Interviews

Perspectives from the Border: Personal and Social Horizons

Hello. Thank you for meeting with me today. I understand that you have returned to Suncheon where you spent your student years, and that you have been teaching at a university there for several years now. Place and region have been enduring concerns in your work, from your debut to the present. If the hometown depicted in your earlier fiction was often read as a place you had left behind, then in your most recent collection, We’re Okay Here, stories centered on the “here” where you are now situated stand out in particular.  Just as one’s positionality can shape one’s perspective and attitude, the hometown written from the city and the hometown written from “here” give rise to different impressions. I would love to hear how returning to your home region, teaching students at the local university, and writing fiction from this place have changed you as a writer.  For the past five years, I’ve been living in Suncheon, where I also attended high school. My hometown is about an hour away. Rather than feeling that I’ve come home, I think of myself as being on the outskirts of home. I like this sense of distance.  Since moving back here, my breathing has certainly grown easier, as if I’ve returned to the world of my mother tongue. And yet, there are times when this place feels suddenly unfamiliar to me. I find myself discovering things I hadn’t known before, and this sense of time-walking through the gaps that have opened over the past thirty years also feels new. For writers, I think our hometowns pull at us as much as they push us away. Because I don’t know my hometown anymore, you could say that I haven’t so much returned home as that I’ve arrived here from some other world.  As I reread your fiction to prepare for this interview, I was struck once again by the expansiveness of your fictional territory. Beginning with the vernacular of your hometown, your work extends outward to the Cambodian border, Mongolia, and even to the Rohingya people of Myanmar. I’d like to ask about your hometown and rural society, which served as a point of departure for your literary work. “Chasing Chickens,” your first short story published in 1994, is celebrated for vividly portraying rural life with its rich dialect and strong vernacular texture. Your first collection, Burying Incense, is similarly oriented. Considering that the mainstream of 1990s literature leaned toward erasing regional differences, this must have given you much to wrestle with. At the same time, it seems to me that your decision not to follow prevailing literary trends helped secure the distinctiveness of your work as a writer. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I began my career by writing stories rooted in my hometown. That was simply who I was at the time. It wasn’t so much that I believed I knew rural society well; I just felt I was lacking in the knowledge of city life. What troubled me most, however, was that I had not yet discovered what I truly wanted to write. Though I was physically immersed in a big city, my heart leaned toward home. I guess I struggled with my identity.  As a writer, I believed there existed an original core to who I was, and that it had been distorted or contaminated. I began writing in search of that original form. Through fiction, I tried to separate what was truly mine from what was not, believing that once I found myself, I would finally be able to write the kind of literature I genuinely wanted to pursue. In that sense, writing about my hometown became a means of searching for my origins.  But of course, there is no such thing as an original form for a human being. I eventually came to see myself as someone who had lost their home, with no choice but to set out on the road and wander outward. Only later did I realize that this journey had become my literary world. From the outside, leaving home and returning home may appear to be a smooth trajectory, but inwardly, it feels more like the scattered tracks of a traveler drifting from place to place, unable to settle anywhere.  Mongolia is an important source of inspiration for you. In 2005, you spent six months there, and that experience seems to have become fertile ground for several stories, including the title piece of your third story collection, Wolves. Could you talk about how your time there influenced your writing? I’m also curious about how you view Mongolia now. You’ve returned several times since then, and this year marks twenty years since you first connected with the country. Mongolia itself must have undergone significant changes amid the currents of globalization. I haven’t been able to return since the pandemic began. Before that, though, I first stayed there for six months thanks to a residency program, and then went back about eight more times on shorter visits. From what I hear from friends who continue to travel there, Mongolia has changed a great deal in recent years. If I were to go now, Ulaanbaatar would probably feel unfamiliar. Given the pace of change, I’m guessing it has become like every other big city around the world.  I was in my early thirties when I spent those six months there. Back then, international exchange in the Korean literary world was just beginning to take shape. New partnerships were forming with writers’ organizations in places like Vietnam and Mongolia, and the first overseas residency programs were only just emerging. At the time, I felt a strong urge to go somewhere unfamiliar, to stop writing for a while, and simply live. Mongolia offered the shock of an entirely different world: a nomadic culture set against an agrarian one, a society in transition from socialism to a market economy, and at the same time a place where layers of Korea’s own path to modernization seemed visibly sedimented. It also felt like a kind of third space, where North and South Korea coexisted . . . Writing came naturally there. These were issues I had already been thinking about during my student days as an activist. Luckily for me, I was already searching for a way to write from the perspective of someone standing at the border, someone attuned to the social discourses people sense in everyday life, and to the meeting point between personal and political horizons.  My time in Mongolia was, psychologically, the most intense period of struggle I have known. It offered a loneliness so deep that I wondered if I would ever encounter it again. And as a human being, I felt that I had become freer and more mature. When I returned to Korea, I had the sense, for the first time since becoming an adult, that I was coming home.  The story “Empty Cans,” published in this issue of KLN, reads as an extension of the Mongolian narrative from Wolves. Broadly speaking, it follows Nergüi, who spent his early childhood on the steppe, as he parts from the landscape that shaped him and sets off for Ulanbaatar. Compared to the story “Wolves,” which is charged with grief and fierce intensity over the destruction of Mongolian nomadic life under capitalism, “Empty Cans” unfolds in a more restrained register, telling the story of nine-year-old Nergüi as he yields to this historical current and learns to live within it. What were you hoping to express through this work?  The Mongolia I encountered in 2005 was a place where traditional nomadic life and modern urban life coexisted and collided. I have often described it through the image of a herder on horseback passing in front of a Motorola billboard erected on the steppe. On Mongolian soil, the world of myth and neoliberalism stood side by side, and I wanted to capture that image.The figure of the wolf became a medium to grasp this tension. The wolf is both the greatest threat to livestock and, at the same time, a being imbued with spirit-like mythic presence. In that sense, “Wolves” can be described as a work of image-hunting, a pursuit of an archetypal figure that gathers these contradictions.  What fascinated me about Mongolia, however, was its nomadic imagination: a sensibility shaped by a land that is not owned, and an attitude toward life that, to my eyes, appeared cold and unsentimental. “Empty Cans” captures just a single shard of Mongolian nomadic life.   When you write about migration and diaspora, you seem especially attentive to borders. What led you to this choice? When writing about others beyond the self, or about unfamiliar places, what do you keep foremost in mind as you work? I think I’ve already touched on why I try to adopt the perspective of someone at the border. It is to stand at the edge where crossings occur. I think maybe all that literature can truly capture is the gesture, the attempt, to understand the unknowable world of the other. A sense of that unknowability has to come first.  When I can only write from myself, I try to position that self honestly, and to show the conditions in which it is ruptured from within by another world. I’m interested in capturing the moment when the self begins to waver. When writing from the position of an insider, I place the character as close to the edge as possible. Only someone who is shaken to the core, and capable of reflection, can come close to the truth.   I see your sustained engagement with inter- Korean relations as a crucial aspect of your work. Stories such as “The Magnolia” and “River Crossers” remain vivid in my memory even now. In the afterword to The Second Self-Portrait, you describe “Rodong Sinmun,” “Visiting Graves,” and “The House of Longing for Home” as “stories conceived while traveling along the armistice line.” In the more recent “Reunion,” you address the issue of separated families. Questions surrounding North-South relations once formed a major lineage often referred to as “division literature.” Since around 2010, however, it seems that this tradition has waned among younger writers.  What strikes me about your treatment of division is that, rather than exposing wounds head-on, it conveys a history that remains unresolved and draws attention to those who continue to carry its pain. Were you consciously trying to depict division differently from earlier generations of writers? As a writer living on the divided Korean peninsula, what would you like to say about this condition now? I came to understand, during my college years, that many of the contradictions of Korean society originate in its division. Most of us go about our lives without giving it much thought, yet division shapes the structural foundations of our society and manifests in a wide range of social problems. Individuals are not free from its effects. Division has been so deeply internalized that we have grown numb to it, yet we continue to live as citizens peculiary caught within its contradictions.  My generation does not carry direct experiences of war or family separation in the way earlier writers did, but I wanted to write fiction that traces how division continues to operate in everyday life. I also wanted to avoid treating division as mere subject matter. Instead, I tried to inscribe it as part of my own lived experience. My military service near the armistice line, along with three encounters with people from the North, became formative experiences for me. At present, inter-Korean relations are stalled, offering few immediate points of stimulus for Korean writers. However, if things were to shift suddenly and exchanges were to become more active, I believe we would see an increase in literary works engaging with the question of division. On the level of lived experiences, I intend to keep grappling with this issue and carrying it into my fiction.  You entered university in the late 1980s and took part in the student movement of the 1990s. You made your literary debut in your third year at university and, through your involvement with the Writers’ Association of Korea, you did not hesitate to step forward as a writer engaged with social issues. In a past interview, you spoke of beginning to write with the conviction of committing yourself to a lifelong movement. How have these experiences of activism shaped your literature? And in our present moment, what role do you think writers can play in working toward a better society? For my generation, participating in social movements was not especially dangerous. Our creative environment was very different from that of earlier generations who wrote under military dictatorship. I became a writer in a context where alternative ways of living, and multiple forms of literary practice, were genuinely possible. Around the time I began writing, there was a persistent question: Why become a professional writer at all? When I was a student, there was even a sense of resistance to the institutional debut system that produced established writers, because there was always the alternative path of becoming a full-time social activist.  I was involved in a literary movement grounded in collective creation, and when I committed myself to writing, I believed it was possible to do so as part of a lifelong practice of resistance. Writers from earlier generations had lived this way. That said, I wasn’t envisioning organized activism. Rather, I believed that a writer’s life could be a way of continuing to grow and mature over a lifetime. And I believed that society surrounding us should flow onto the writer’s desk.  You can see this in the way younger writers came together around the June 9 Writers’ Declaration* following the Yongsan tragedy and President Roh Moo-hyun’s death, and in how writers later responded, through solidarity and literary practice, to the Sewol ferry disaster, the MeToo movement and the reboot of feminism, and the impeachment process. A writer’s desk cannot be otherwise. * Translator’s Note: The June 9 Writers’ Declaration (6·9 작가선언) was issued in 2009 by 188 Korean writers. Framing writing as an act of resistance rather than ideology, the declaration affirmed literature’s obligation to human dignity and collective responsibility.  Reading your essay on the martial law declaration, “Why Did I Get Off the Train,” I had the sense of catching a glimpse of the lives and ways of thinking of your generation, as well as those of the earlier “386 Generation.” The same student activists who once worked fervently to uncover the suspicious death of Student Council President Lee Nae-chang, and who are now part of the older generation, still head to Yeouido or Gwanghwamun to protest during national crises.  I found myself lingering over your phrase “civic health.” I imagine you were in Suncheon at the time of the martial law declaration, and I would like to hear about your experience of martial law and the public square. It would be especially meaningful if you could reflect on how the public squares or demonstrations you encountered in your youth compare with those of today. I belong to a community formed to commemorate a colleague who died under suspicious circumstances at the hands of state authority during our student years. The cause of that death has yet to be uncovered, and for more than thirty years we have continued our work demanding truth and accountability. Of course, those three decades encompass much more than that. These are people who lived their lives as working adults while pursuing this cause, and because their colleague’s death resulted from an abuse of power, they have remained committed to fighting social injustice.  They have lived as better citizens, as thoughtful voters, and as everyday people devoted to solidarity. I hold deep respect for this kind of civic health. Their children have now grown into university students, and they, too, come out into the streets during moments like the impeachment period. When I stand in the square, I don’t look toward the front lines but toward the young people all around me. Sometimes I go out simply because I want to see them.  I am struck by the way this younger generation knows how to take pleasure even in protest culture, and by the diverse connections and solidarities they form. The desire for a better society feels unchanged, whether thirty years ago or today. I believe that this civic health alone is enough to connect me to the younger generation.   Your most recent short story collection, We’re Okay Here, marks your first collection in a long while, so I imagine it carries particular weight for you. Compared with your earlier, more primal works, these stories feel more contemplative, with a more leisurely gaze directed toward the younger generation. In that sense, the book seems to mark a shift in your literary landscape. Stories such as “Into the Forest” and “Family Bus” can be read as narratives about your generation witnessing the passing of an earlier generation and its elders. After more than thirty years of writing, as you enter your middle age, I imagine you’ve thought about growing older. As someone positioned between the younger and older generations, could you share how these reflections have found their way into your writing?  Perhaps because I began writing fiction as a journey to find myself in my youth, I feel that I can only write as much as I have lived. The experience of losing one’s parents is part of that. There comes a time when you have to let them go. Senior writers I deeply respected are also leaving this world. On my phone now, wedding invitations and obituaries arrive in almost equal measure.  I think I’ve carried the question of when one becomes an adult for a long time. These days, I wonder if the question itself is misguided. I don’t think I’ll ever arrive at a clear sense of having grown up. Kenzaburō Ōe once said that an artist’s aging runs counter to ideas of maturity or harmony with society, and instead remains bound up with the contradictions one carries as an individual, along with a sense of catastrophe. I find this convincing. To me, it doesn’t sound like an inability to escape contradiction and ruin, but rather a choice not to escape them. In any case, I continue to practice a kind of self-guidance, reminding myself that I need to keep walking my own path as a writer. I want to see how far my literary journey can go.   Is there a work you would like to introduce to readers outside Korea?  I would like to share my fourth short story collection, The Second Self-Portrait. It offers a glimpse of how Koreans live their everyday lives today, and what the lives of middle-aged Koreans look like.   In the afterword to We’re Okay Here, you regretted writing only as much as you breathed. This felt deeply characteristic of you. I read it as an honest confession that a writer can only write as much as they have lived and breathed. I hope you will continue to write and breathe for a long, long time. I would love to hear about stories you haven’t yet finished, stories you feel compelled to write, and your thoughts on your next work.  I keep finding more things I want to write about. I want to write about my father’s generation, about the later years of parents who’ve lost children to suspicious deaths, and about the Yeosu-Suncheon Incident that began on October 19, a tragedy tied to the region where I live, which perhaps I’ll do in the form of a novel. I also want to continue writing short stories that capture everyday life.  I feel embarrassed whenever I am asked about my next work because I’m such a lazy writer. These questions were difficult, but they pushed me to think more deeply. I wish you, Kim Yudam, continued strength in your own writing as well. Thank you.   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: Jeon Sungtae, “Chasing Chickens,” in Burying Incense (Silcheon Munhak, 1999) 전성태, 「닭몰이」, 『매향』 (실천문학, 1999) Jeon Sungtae, Crossing Borders (Changbi, 2005) 전성태, 『국경을 넘는 일』 (창비, 2005) Jeon Sungtae, “Wolves,” “The Magnolia,” and “River Crossers,” in Wolves (tr. Sora Kim-Russell, White Pine Press, 2017) 전성태, 「늑대」, 「목란식당」, 「강을 건너는 사람들」, 『늑대』 (창비, 2009) Jeon Sungtae, “Rodong Sinmun,” “Visiting Graves,” and “The House of Longing for Home,” in The Second Self-Portrait (Changbi, 2015) 전성태, 「로동신문」, 「성묘」, 「망향의 집」, 『두 번의 자화상』 (창비, 2015) Jeon Sungtae, “Reunion,” “Into the Forest,” and “Family Bus,” in We’re Okay Here (Changbi, 2024) 전성태, 「상봉」, 「숲으로」, 「가족 버스」, 『여기는 괜찮아요』 (창비, 2024) Jeon Sungtae, “Why Did I Get Off the Train,” The Journal of Literary Creative Writing 24, no. 2 (2025) 전성태, 「나는 중간역에서 내린다」, 『한국문예창작』 24권 2호 (한국문예창작학회, 2025) 

by Kim Yudam

Interviews

The Work of Collecting, Dislocating and Transplanting

When I think of you, the first thing that comes to mind is your collection Biologicity. I just intuitively got so many sensations from it about poetic lan­guage. I think every poet in Korea must have read it. If your first collection, Precise Arrangement, scratched the surface of your poetics, Biologicity, your second, feels like the book itself is a body for its poems, alive and moving. The way I’d put it is that it was as if the coat you’d previously worn artificially turned into skin. How did you use your time to give your collection that sense of having a body? Around the time Precise Arrangement came out in 2005, I wrote a children’s book. It was pretty long—dozens of pages. That was a moment when I started having doubts: Are poems the thing I really want to write? I liked writing things I’d imagined much more than I liked writing about the world of experience. But in my poems, I hated going on and on describing or explaining the scenes I was imagining. How are you going to preserve the scenes you imagine without describing or explaining them, though? In Precise Arrangement, I’d assigned places to the poem’s voices by the titles and subtitles of the chapters—“Motel Cello, Room 102,” “Black and White Village,” and so forth. As a way of extrapolating. Wrapping things from the outside. But is this all there is? Should I be writing something other than poems? What if what I want to write isn’t right for a poem? That’s what was going through my mind when I wrote the children’s story. Back then, I was thinking that maybe the genre of children’s fiction might fit my imagi­nation, because it’d paraphrase these weird scenes and images I’d either written, or wanted to write, into poems. I don’t think what I wrote would have resonated with actual kids. And after I wrote that, I realized: the stuff I’d planned to write as poems, I had to write as poems. And what I didn’t want to write, I didn’t have to write. So to do that, I felt around for a way to drop the anchor of sensa­tion in those scenes from my imagination, and wrote the poems that went into Biologicity. I’d like to ask when you first knew you had to write poetry. You made your formal literary debut when you were twenty-four, and after that, you kept on steadily publishing collections about once every five years, on average. And when I think about how those books evolved not so much from honing your earlier language, but rather continually betraying and overthrowing it—I’m just astonished by your ferocity, your perseverance. I’ve always loved reading and writing since I was very young. But I didn’t think I’d end up writing poetry. Because like plenty of other people, I thought poetry was something only exceptionally talented people wrote. But when I was in college, a professor compli­mented me on this poem I’d turned in as a class project. You know how sometimes compliments are really powerful? So I submitted to a Sinchun Munye contest on a lark, and gosh, I got picked. So it was actually after I’d won this formal debut contest that I basically started learning the craft. It was only then that I started shedding all these hazy illusions about poetry, and I had to reconsider what I wanted to write, and whether that was poetry or not, a bunch of times. And if I did move in the direction of betraying and overthrowing the way I’d worked before, maybe it was because the self-doubt leached into my body. There are a lot of instances in your poetry of highly unusual words. I think this has only gotten more pronounced in your recent books. The way you manage to bring this totally unpoetic vocabulary into your poems—it leaves me amazed. The thought’s occurred to me that Korean poetry’s denotative range has really expanded because of your work. Could you reflect a bit on your way of using words? Whether at the level of words or the sentence, I think anyone who writes poems is going to have their own particular fetish about language. I’m that way, too. And everyone’s way of handling that fetish goes into making a poem’s style, I suppose. In my case, I might say I work at “collecting,” “dislocating,” and “transplanting.” For starters, I collect words no matter what. Especially words with a strange energy to them—but which, in their original context and range, look subordinate to their indexical function, dead and buried under the dust of habit. I think, Can I bring the word back to life? And when I think that, I’m taking it out of its original place, moving it to different earth, and planting it. I can’t just inject it with whatever meaning I want. If I did that, it’d just turn into a private code. But words that aren’t encrypted are necessarily enfolded within a shared world and history, by their very nature. So I’m digging them up by the roots, moving them, and planting them somewhere else where they can have a new life—and in order to do that, my role is to choose the soil of a text, and fertilize them there. In your second collection, Biologicity, there’s a poem, “White,” that starts: “It’s cold. / I don’t want to be catalogued.” The critic Shin Hyoung Cheol reads these lines this way: “When we lose our independence, absorbed into generality—that is, when I’m no longer my unique, intact self—we get ‘catalogued.’” And he says that once the poet’s aspirations get catalogued, they tend to go awry. But then, the moment I picked up your fourth collection, Caecilians, I ran right into—a catalogue! That made such an impression on me. There are two possible questions here. I’d like to ask: What is a “catalogue” to you? And how did your poetry change between Biologicity and Caecilians? “Catalogue.” I didn’t think about it all that hard, but you’re right. That’s true of the first poem in Caecilians, and it’s also true of the back cover—I just made a catalogue of four-character words.  To come at it another way: let’s take the word “sigangam” [“time-feel”]. The emotional fruition of time. Once I jotted down a note that said something like this: “Alchemists set out to make gold; artists try to produce time.” Even if you’re just dealing with a fraction of a mo­ment. I think literature is the challenge of trying to save time in textual form. Sort of the opposite of the idiom “killing time.” (That phrase is so fraught with resentment toward time.)  In Biologicity, I wanted to try to save time in that void created between lines, between stanzas. But I couldn’t put in movement just by leaving the space empty. Not time’s flow—time’s motion. It needed something like aether. And I might have switched directions by giving that role to the rhythm of the catalogue.  You must have gotten a ton of questions about the titles of your books. I’m curious, too, especially about Biologicity, which was your second book, then syzygy, which followed it, and Caecilians. They somehow talk about the collection, but without explaining it. Every time you’ve published a book, I feel like I’m hearing you say, “This is the lump I’m gonna show you this time.” You don’t just unwrap it and see what’s inside—it’s just a lump of matter, and there’s no distinction between the two. How do you go about choosing your titles? The titles of the poems kept changing as they came together into a collection. I’d make “Biologicity” the title of one poem, then another poem, and it just kept floating around because it couldn’t find a place. You know that feeling of sliding around because you can’t stick anywhere? So, ironically, “Biologicity” left its traces over a bunch of different poems. And then I thought, why not make it the title of the whole book?In the case of syzygy and Caecilians, I settled on titles when I’d written about half the poems. And the moment I came across the words “syzygy” and “caeci­lian,” I knew. I knew the poems I was writing then were all aiming at the materiality of those words. You’ve written two books of literary criticism (not under your pen name, Hae-uk, but your given name), three books of essays, and a novel, The Dream Reader Electrical Shop. It must feel like you’re in a totally different body from when you’re writing poetry. I bring this up because I think if we hear you comparing how you wrote them, we might be able to get a different angle on your process. Well, the two books I wrote under my legal name weren’t really criticism so much as research. One was the edited version of my thesis, which traced the development of writing in Korean. The history of writing in hangeul with Korean word order is surprisingly short. Most writing was in Literary Sinitic up to the end of the nineteenth century. I wanted to look into the deep origins of my own writing.  Out of my two more recent non-poetry books, The Dream Reader Electrical Shop got published as a novel, and Looking out the Window came out a year later as a collection of essays. But when I was writing them, I thought of both as somewhere on the border between novel and essay. It wasn’t so much that I was hunting for something in particular on that border. There’s something in calling them novels that didn’t feel right, and something in calling them essays that didn’t feel right, either—like I felt some magnetic repulsion to genres. At any rate, as I was working on these two non-poetry books, I realized something more clearly about how I write poetry.  Scenes, thoughts, feelings—when the thing I want to express is at the forefront, I approach it in prose.  But vocabulary, passages, sentences—when those matter more, I’m writing in verse. So for instance, my plan at first for The Dream Reader Electrical Shop was to write a collection of my dreams that would be close to poetry, and I had this hope that they’d all read like poems. But I didn’t think of my dreams as poems.Because I wanted to stay loyal in bringing dreamscapes into the language of this world. It was a kind of transla­tion. Writing dreams for what they are was something quite different from writing poems that borrowed motifs or images from dreams.  And when I write in prose, I have to write sentences I don’t especially want to write, too. You have to keep the context and the situation consistent. When I write poetry, I only write what I want. But even though it might sound like tons of fun to write just what you want, it’s actually even more aggravating, because it all has to make sense in the end, right? Because poems have to be made out of words, too. When you write only what you want to write, and you don’t explain word by word, and you don’t have to adhere to the laws of cause and effect, what kind of word-world might be possible? So when you write a poem, you can’t avoid going on an adventure.  And you might put it in a metaphor this way: You have to cross a street but there’s no crosswalk. How are you going to do it? Even if it’s a pain, prose hunts around for a crosswalk or an underpass, and eventually crosses the street in orderly, everyday steps. Poetry leaps like a dancer and touches down on the other side. When I opened up Caecilians and read your poem “Mysterious Object at Noon,” I came across you saying, “Cross the line. I cross,” and I felt like I was hearing your physical voice. It’s at one and the same time you censoring yourself, but also making a declaration; “crossing lines” is exactly what you do best; and it’s through the act of crossing lines that it becomes possible to draw closer to real objects, real feelings. It’d be great to hear you talk about “Mysterious Object at Noon.” Or the poem right before it, “Demolition.” Could you talk about your work as an experience of “crossing lines” through a particular poem? I once followed a stranger wearing a backpack. They were standing in front of a subway station escalator. The zipper was open the right amount. Not totally all the way open. But you couldn’t say it was completely shut, either. Just the right amount of open. I wanted to slip my hand into it. But I couldn’t. I didn’t tell them their backpack was open, either. After I followed them for a block or so, I wrote two lines on a notebook: “The bag was open. Your bag.” That was the first sentence of “Mysterious Object at Noon.” And then the line you mentioned from the middle of the poem: “Cross the line. I cross.” The distance between those two sentences is really quite far. There had to be something that could withstand, yet also maintain, that sense of distance, and after a long time, I felt like I found that something there on my way back from the National Library in Seocho-dong. That zone where you feel like you’ve transcended the heart of the city even though you’re in the very center of Seoul—the courthouse, the library, the General Services Administration, St. Mary’s Hospital, the department store. When I was in that zone, I felt like I could load that dynamism into those two sentences. In my old way of writing, I would have put it in the blank space between the sentences. But because blanks are pure silence, they can’t convey motion. I don’t know whether that was an experience of “crossing the line,” but I definitely did want to move. You’ve talked about the “foreign-object sensa­tion” as part of language, in an essay you titled “Literature in Korean and the Pleasures of Foreign Objects.” One of the examples you give is how when Bong Joon Ho’s film Madeo (마더) went to Cannes, it got titled Mother. But transliterating the English word “mother” into Korean as “madeo” highlights that discomfort, that feeling like there’s a foreign object somewhere in your body—a sense that the Korean word “eomeoni” would have just blown past. But the audience at Cannes couldn’t feel that when it got turned back into the English word “mother.” In your poem “The Noblewoman and the Grandmother,” the word “olke” appears—this very short, very Korean word for “sister-in-law.” I was sort of excited to see how that might get translated, sort of worried about whether it was even possible! You’ve been writing in this way that draws such incredibly Korean words into your poems, and maximizes that foreign-object sensation, and there are so many other words other than olke that leave you wondering how they’ll be translated. How do you go about thinking about this? I have an olke. But I’ve never called her that. All those words in Korean for extended family by marriage feel awkward on my lips. Pronouncing olke even feels kind of bizarre. But at the same time, I feel a kind of nostalgia about it, too. My late grandmother called my great-aunt, who was younger than her, olke. The awkwardness and the nostalgia coexist in the word. That collision’s the driving force that launched this poem. And I had faith that someone speaking Korean, and who was inside the magnetic field of the poem, would sense the wavelength of that word in their own way from cultural context, irrespective of my own personal context. And how could you translate it? Olke’s the word for a family relationship, and also a term of address; I told my trans­lator that if you can only keep one of the two, better to stress the feeling of people talking to each other than the precise kind of relationship.  There was one other word I asked his opinion about, the word “bo-i” in the poem “humoresque.” It’s a little like what we were saying about Bong Joon Ho’s Mother. I told him that the word “bo-i” in this poem didn’t mean the same thing as English “boy,” that it was a little bit of a dated term from the early- and mid-twentieth century for something like “waiter.” He asked me if I thought the French word “garçon” might work in the English transla­tion. Because it’s not really used in contemporary English anymore, and you only come across it in old movies.  When I think of my poems in translation, they feel like Voyager 2, out beyond our solar system. Because even though I know a decent amount of English, at the level of my own senses, the poems are crossing beyond the horizon of my language. And in the same way I hope the Earth sounds on the Voyager 2 record reach some kind of alien lifeform, I just hope the nuances of my language also touch someone out there.  I was reading “On Location,” which features the historical figure Jang Huibin, and when the line “I couldn’t stand it” appeared, I liked it—but at the same time, it threw me! That’s right. I felt that foreign-object feeling. How even in a place I couldn’t possibly imagine that the lyric “I” would show up, there it showed up anyway. What kind of entity is that lyric “I” to you? Do you have to get at it through the idea that poetry as a genre is impossible without it? Or should we approach it through the foreign-body sensation from that “I” showing up somewhere unexpected? Or if it’s neither of those, give me a sense of where else it might be.  Thank you for noticing that. I also felt a sort of resistance when I put that “I” in “On Location.” The scene would have been clearer, more stable without it. But it had to be there. Can I say it wanted to be involved? Or that it wanted to squeeze in? Or that once it squeezed in, it wanted to be excluded?  I often think I’m stuck in the prison of the first person. I want to get out. But I don’t know how. There are so few times where I put my own experiences and feelings in the center of a poem that it’d be fine for me to leave out that first-person speaker, but I can’t do it. Is that also narcissism? As of right now, all I can say is I have my doubts.   In this new collection, Natural History from the Edge of the Natural, there’s not just a lyric “I,” but also a “One” and a “We.” Their presence seems pretty intentional. “We” leaks into the speaker’s position quite naturally, while it seems kind of hard for “One” to take that spot. “One” is closer to “I” semantically, but grammatically, it’s third-personal. Is “One” here one person out of the many “I’s”? Does the idea of “One” correspond with that of “I”?  Just to add to my earlier answer—you might call “One” an attempt to broaden the range of movement inside the prison of the first person. That’s the hope I try to keep alive in jail. I want to write sentences without subjects. I want to live in a world of headless sentences. It’s an impossible hope. Because even a hidden subject still exists.  But if it has to be there, then what about making it sparse, blurry? Erase traits like gender and age, blur lines between singular and plural, first person and third, individual and group, human and object. If form collapses, and movement and action take center stage, aren’t we at least a little closer to a world of subject-free language? I feel like I can say “One” and “We” ended up appearing as I tried to find the path there. There have already been a wide range of attempts to figure out what the book’s title means, and I’m sure there’s going to be more ahead. But while I have you for this interview, I’d like to hear what you have to say yourself. There are four poems that have the same title as the collection itself. Could you talk a bit about why you decided to emphasize the word “nature” by putting it in your poems, and why you added “edge” and “natural history,” too?  The title just came to me in one piece, so it wasn’t like I was thinking about each individual word. But it is a bit of a weighty title, and I’ve thought in hindsight about how it strikes readers.  “Nature” is a frustrating word. In Korean, it’s “jayeon,” from the roots “ja,” which means “itself” or “on its own,” and “yeon,” “to be that way, be such a way.” “The way things just are” should mean some featureless state that’s just there, but it’s somehow turned into this rigid word for a clear concept positioned at the opposite pole of either civilization or artifice. It’s ossified into the diametric opposite of its original meaning. I feel resistant to it, but it’s such a familiar, everyday word that I couldn’t avoid it. So maybe that’s why I added “edge.” That poses the reverse question: what is “un-natural” in a place that’s neither inside nor outside? And if “edge” asks a spatial question, you might say that “natural history” raises a temporal question.  I’m fond of short stories. Sometimes I gather and read a bunch at once, but sometimes I read them in odd moments. But at some point, I found my tastes finding their way into my poetry. How does it feel to you when you read literature other than poetry, and have you ever found something you enjoy absorbing back into your poems?  I have some sort of challenge when it comes to reading. (I guess it’s ironic for someone who’s chosen to read and write for a living to say she has challenges reading.) Often it’s novels; sometimes I just get stuck at a sentence and I can’t go on to the next one. The problem isn’t that the sentence has some obscure meaning you have to ruminate over to understand. It’s usually when it’s conveying simple, descriptive content. Something like, say, “He was sitting behind the desk.” Well, where is the desk’s front, and what direction is the back pointing? He’s sitting, but how is he sitting? I get hung up on details totally unimportant to actually reading, and start acting out the motions, and then I can’t move on to the next page. It’s like lag time on a computer. But on the other hand, reading poetry, or even just anything that has sentences with a rhythm, tends to just breeze along, regardless of the level of difficulty. Do I dislike that lag time when I’m reading fiction, though? No, not at all. Come to think of it, I kind of enjoy it. It’s yet another plaisir du texte. And almost all these inclinations work their way into writing poems. I’ll never be one of those people who read tons, but I do think I’m at least a “textarian.”  Last of all, I wanted to ask if you have any plans for meeting readers outside of Korea? Please do tell us what’s up next, whether new translations, readings, or other events.  I do know that Natural History from the Edge of the Natural is in the middle of being translated by Spencer Lee-Lenfield, who translated Biologicity. It still has a number of steps to go through before it’s published, so for the moment, I’m just hoping that it all goes smoothly.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:Shin Hae-uk, Precise Arrangement (Minumsa, 2005) 신해욱, 『간결한 배치』 (민음사, 2005)Shin Hae-uk, “White,” in Biologicity (tr. Spencer Lee- Lenfield, Black Ocean, 2024) 신해욱, 「화이트」 『생물성』 (문학과지성사, 2009) Shin Hae-uk, syzygy (Moonji, 2014) 신해욱, 『syzygy』 (문학과지성사, 2014) Shin Hae-uk, “Mysterious Object at Noon” and “Demolition,” in Caecilians (Moonji, 2019) 신해욱, 「정오의 신비한 물체」, 「파훼」, 『무족영원』 (문학과지성사, 2019) Shin Hae-uk, “The Noblewoman and the Grandmother,” “Humoresque,” and “On Location,” from Natural History from the Edge of the Natural (Spring Day Books, 2024) 신해욱, 「귀부인과 할머니」, 「유머레스크」, 「로케이션」, 『자연의 가장자리와 자연사』 (봄날의책, 2024) Shin Hae-uk, The Dream Reader Electrical Shop (Changbi, 2020) 신해욱, 『해몽전파사』 (창비, 2020) Shin Hae-uk, Looking out the Window (Moonji, 2021) 신해욱, 『창밖을 본다』 (문학과지성사, 2021) Shin Hae-uk, “Literature in Korean and the Pleasures of Foreign Objects” (Munhakdongne The Quarterly, Fall 2009) 신해욱, 「이물감의 쾌락과 한국어-문학」, 『문학동네 2009 가을』 (문학동네, 2009년)  

by Im Seungyu

Interviews

Believing in Possibilities Despite Everything

I’ve been wondering how you are. I’ve been think­ing about you a lot, especially this past winter and spring, whether I was at Gwanghwamun Square or watching the news. I think it’s important to express different perspectives on how we in Korean society have spent the days between December 3, 2024, and now, with former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law, his impeachment, and the early election this year. How have you been? I’ve thought of you often, too. It seems we thought about each other a lot these past few months. I won­dered how you were coping with the unrest, and if you were doing okay. I asked myself what we’d talk about if we met, where we’d meet, what we’d see and hear, and what kind of experience it would be for each of us. I’ve been wanting to take a long trip around Namhae, but I couldn’t leave the Seoul area for the past half a year. My eyes were focused on the Constitutional Court in Gwanghwamun, and the National Assembly in Yeouido. I attended impeachment rallies on week­ends and also went out into the streets when some­thing important came up; at home, I listened to the news all day. I finished writing a short story this winter. And up until recently, I was putting together the manu­script for my second non-fiction collection. An excerpt from your diary published this spring talks about how the so-called Jeon Bong-jun Protest Group, consisting of farmers from all over the nation, was stopped by the police at Namtaeryeong Pass, the gateway to Seoul, while heading to the presidential residence in their tractors; and how their supporters stayed with them through the night so that they could march on to their destination. You wrote: “I reflected on my getting old. My automatic belief that they wouldn’t succeed; the way I gave up based on what I saw and heard. I was ashamed, but today, I gladly accepted my shame.” I’d like to talk about that shame. It was Saturday, December 21. Chairman Ha Won-oh of the Korean Peasants League, who’d been stopped in Namtaeryeong on the day of the protest, came to Gwanghwamun afterward and spoke at an emergency protest rally. I was there when he said, “The Jeon Bong-jun Protest Group is at Namtaeryeong, but the police are blocking their path. I’m going to bring them to Gwanghwamun.” But all I did was listen. I marched on to Myeongdong, then went back home to Paju. It didn’t occur to me that I could go meet the farmers. Watching the Namtaeryeong vigil on TV later on, I was amazed and thankful, but I couldn’t stop asking myself questions. Why did I act that way? Why didn’t I go there?  It occurred to me that maybe I believed automati­cally that, the same as always, they wouldn’t “succeed,” because the police force is a strong public power, while I’m just a little individual, and because the protest group had always been stopped from entering Seoul in the same way; that it wasn’t a belief or a thought of mine, but just a habit. I often say I want to have, or do have, the faith that things can change for the better, as they should—a faith in new possibilities. But sitting in the square on December 21, I didn’t have that faith in me. I didn’t believe in anything, nothing stirred my heart, and I’d given up on something. I didn’t know what I’d given up on, but when I saw the people who’d gone there on that cold night and perse­vered until the morning, I realized that I’d taken the liberty of giving up on them. Believing, without even realizing, that just like always, they wouldn’t succeed. That’s what shamed me—that I was fine, when I’d rashly given up on people who could’ve gotten hurt. Reacting out of habit like that, and having a heart that isn’t easily moved, is what I call getting old. That’s the term I use, but I want to express it some other way, because I don’t want to use the phrase “getting old” in a negative way anymore. I’m sorry I began the interview with such a heavy topic about Korean society. My questions were based on what you said in an interview for Sisa IN, in 2021: “When you say something’s too political, you’re saying you don’t want to know what the issue is about. I think that’s a very political attitude—it means you don’t need to think about it.” You began your career with the short story “Mother” in 2005, so it’s been exactly twenty years. I’m sure many things have changed for you, but what would you say remains unchanged? It’s hard to think of anything that hasn’t changed. Maybe it’s hard for me to separate it from my life because it’s become a part of my life. But I would say my fear of deadlines hasn’t changed. I still rewrite sentences over and over again, choosing each word carefully. And I still love to read.  Your earlier short stories depict the inner world of suffering characters with a touch of fantasy. Then, starting with One Hundred Shadows, your first full-length novel, you began to incorporate society’s structural problems into your work, with “a desire to see the outside world” as you stated in an interview with Channel Yes magazine in 2012. How has the focus of your fiction changed? I’m having trouble moving on from the last question, about things that haven’t changed. The more I think about it, the less things seem to have changed. When I write, I’m always somewhere in between want­ing to say something and not wanting to say it. The two desires, for me, hold the same kind of power; the repulsion generated by the two forces is where I do my writing, making endless attempts and giving up time and time again. It’s been that way from the beginning.  I’ve always lived in isolation, since I was little, so sending a novel out into the world and hearing back from the world was a major event for me. I felt that I’d come face to face with “the outside world” as I looked in the directions the answers came from, and experienced different things—especially when I encountered the faces of people crying. I used to distinguish between inner and outer worlds this way, but I no longer feel like that. The world is made up of everything, including myself. That’s how I’ve come to feel through reading and writing. If reading is a way to connect the world to me, writing is a way to connect myself to the world. Doing these two things repeatedly over the years, I’ve come to have a certain feeling—that the world and I are connected, and that through my life, I’m involved in the things that are happening in the world. I know now that it’s always been that way, from the beginning. Your current state, in which you’ve confirmed that you’re connected to the world, seems quite important to your personal life as well. How is your life as an author different from your life before? A life of reading and writing wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I stopped reading books after a collection of world literature I read as a child, so until I was in my mid-twenties, books weren’t a big part of my life. Then I spent the next half of my life reading and writing, which changed a lot of things for me. I came to see life in a completely different way. The most important change was that I began to wonder whether it’s possible for a person to be cynical. When I was younger, I gave up on things easily, harboring cynicism. I can’t do that anymore. As I met people through read­ing and writing, and as I contemplated life in the same way, I could no longer see the world with cynical eyes. Your works depict people in a range of specific occupations—bookstore staff, salespeople, logistics workers, merchants, repairmen, and so on. Can you comment on the care and attention you put into depicting scenes of labor? If my novels depict scenes of labor, that’s probably an inevitable result of my effort to depict life. I have a hard time writing a piece of fiction without first deciding what my characters do for a living, whether or not that’s mentioned. It’s been that way for some time. I think it’s because when I encounter someone’s life, I also encounter the work they do. Now it’s become something I always have to consider.  I tend to pay close attention to the labor people perform in everyday life. I like to think about people’s relationships with their work, how people around them view their work, how their work comes into contact with my life, how they affect me through their work, how my own attitude toward their work affects their work, things like that. It’s fun to think about, and important. In the section “Things to Come” from your novel Years and Years, the character Han Sejin attends a book festival in New York. You yourself participated in the 2018 PEN World Voices Festival in New York at the invitation of LTI Korea. It occurred to me that perhaps your novels are being written even when you’re not in the act of writing. Are there any scenes in particular you feel an urge to set down on paper? “Being written even when you’re not in the act of writing.”That is so true. I think it’s probably the same for all writers. In an author’s mind or heart, everything that happens, every emotion and every moment, is ordinary yet extraordinary. But it’s not until I’m actually writing that I know which of all those things I’ll be writing about. That’s how it is with me, at least. A lot of the time, I have no idea even as I write. Sometimes I write because I keep picturing the same scene over and over, and I want to find out why. But I’d say that what I mostly tend to set down on paper is pain or isolation. As soon as you said “pain or isolation,” I recalled how you mention in your 2021 Diary that one sentence you regret saying so deeply that you don’t think you’ll be able to forget it for the rest of your life was, “How are you?” “How are you?” “How are you?”That was something I’d been asking Korean society, as well as myself, after the Sewol ferry tragedy. That’s all that was on my mind as I wrote those words, but I ended up reading them out loud in front of the victims’ families. It wasn’t that long after the tragedy occurred. The families were listening to my words, at a time when they could neither bear to ask one another how they were, nor be asked. I was deeply embarrassed, and I regretted saying it. It made me reflect on the direction writing takes, and the responsibility of writing. That was the day I resolved not to forget that wherever my writing ends up, there’s always someone there. I consider myself extremely lucky that we speak the same language, that I can catch the rhythm of your sentences and the subtle nuances of the dialogue. On the other hand, whenever I have this thought, I end up thinking about the possibilities of translation. What are your thoughts on translation? As an author, I see a translator as a fellow worker who carries the writing to a point I’ll never arrive at. I attended a translators’ workshop once, at the invitation of LTI Korea. I watched the translators in the process of translating one of my short stories. The way they translated, choosing the words for each sentence with care, writing one sentence at a time, was no different from the way I write a novel. As a reader, I have immense gratitude for translators. I’m not proficient in any foreign language, so I read translated works instead of the originals. Seventy percent of the books I read are translated. For instance, I’ve been able to read a number of books on trees thanks to the translator No Seungyeong, and recently, I was able to read Barry Lopez’s Horizon thanks to the translator Jeong Ji-in. Kim Myeongnam has made it possible for me to read a lot of fascinat­ing books on science, and Kim Eunjeong, the novels of Fleur Jaeggy. Books like these nourish my mind, expand my understanding of the world, and broaden my thinking. I’m extremely grateful, both as an author and as a citizen. If books are a crucial foundation of culture, perhaps the work done by translators lies at its deepest core. So I thought translators must get paid more than authors—I learned only recently that they don’t. I wish translators would receive fair treat­ment and adequate compensation for their work.  While reading your short story “A Day, Without Trouble,” I was especially drawn to how a heavy rainfall in Vietnam impacts Yeongin, who is in Korea, and the feeling that one becomes implicated in violence no matter how one tries not to (“It’s not something I did, but I can’t say it didn’t pass through my hands either.”). Is this sense of nection an anchor to you, or a sail? It’s both.There have been a few times when I sat across someone who was trying to speak while their face was distorted with pain. It made me think of solidarity; then I realized that even before solidarity, my life was already connected to theirs, that my life was already involved in theirs. I came to see that some­one’s circumstances, which were so far removed from me that they seemed irrelevant, could in reality be absolutely relevant. No matter how I try to buy and use and discard less on this planet, I’m always buying and using and discarding all sorts of things. And those things reap­pear in front of me, stained with blood from traveling around the world. I can’t be the only one to break free from this flow. Whether I buy them or not, products whose prices have been reduced by cutting labor costs eventually come into my life in the form of the climate crisis. I don’t eat baked goods sold by big businesses. Baked goods are soft and fluffy and sweet, but people die even while making them. Once, my younger sisters and I were talking about a franchise bakery, and I told them I never go there. One of my sisters got upset and told me not to be like that. She’d been buying their sponge cakes since her kids were little, and when the boycott of their products was in full swing, she’d often seen the owner of the bakery sit­ting in a daze. When you learn something like that, your mind gets tangled with all kinds of thoughts. In those moments, choosing to boycott doesn’t seem right. You can’t stand in front of the bakery owner who’s lost their customers and tell them, “This is right.”I’m not the CEO of the company that distributes the baked goods, and I’m not the person who makes or eats them; nevertheless, something sticky and heavy clings to my palms.  The sense of being implicated makes me feel like I can’t do anything, but at the same time, it makes me want to take interest in different things and take another look at them. And everything I think, feel, and take in during the whole process affects my reading and writing. In “Author’s Note, Rewritten” for the revised Korean edition of One Hundred Shadows, you mention that you were thinking of “the night before” as you wrote the novel, and that for some time afterward, you wanted to title all your novels The Night Before. Can you tell me why? One Hundred Shadows was inspired by the tragic incident that took place in Yongsan, Seoul, in 2009. I wrote it wanting to witness the moment just before the incident occurred, wanting to return to a time before it happened. Because there’s always a range of possibilities just before something happens. That’s why I wanted to title all my works “The Night Before.” Do you still think about that title, “The Night Before”? I don’t think about it often as a title, but I do think about it a lot in everyday life. It’s been hot lately. July has only just begun, but the outdoor temperature today is 39 degrees Celsius. Today, for me, is also the night before.  In “A Day, Without Trouble,” Inbeom says: “Eonni, if the world ever goes to hell and we can’t turn it back, I don’t think it’ll be because people are bad or full of malice. It’ll be because we’re stupid. That numb in­difference. The kind where you see something and feel nothing. That kind of thing.” I thought this was the point your fiction has consistently exposed. I think a lot of people already sense that the humanled world is nearing its end. That seems to be a shared understanding of the world. We feel it each time summer comes around, for instance. Whenever the topic of the climate crisis comes up, my nephew gets really glum and says, “So I’m just going to die without accomplishing anything in the future?” There’s obvious despair and gloom over the future in this child. I can feel it. And I don’t put the blame on the people who’ve lived on Earth so far, or the people living here now. The same with the wars of aggression and massacres taking place on Earth today. The human world can’t be completely destroyed through things done by a few people with malice or hostility. Rather, it’s destroyed through the choices of a lot of people who are indifferent to those things, people who can just let those things pass by. I see the former as nature, and the latter as evil. There was a time for me, too, when I couldn’t speak out against evil, and for the most part I’ll probably be the same way in the future, but there comes a point when you have to speak up and say clearly, “That’s evil.” When blood is everywhere—in the environment, in work, in nature; when people die of starvation or from explosions in a military-occupied territory; when the majority of people don’t pay attention to such things or dismiss them because they’re too painful and complicated; when there are a lot of such people, and their numbers grow, and people easily ignore things out of weakness. As I wrote that part of the story I thought, “I hope I can say clearly that it’s bad.” “dd’s Umbrella,” one of the stories in the collection Into the World of Passi, later evolved into “d,” which is connected to the section “There Is Nothing That Needs to Be Said” from the novel dd’s Umbrella, which led to the novel Years and Years. The desire to rewrite the stories of your characters and create additional space for them in new works seems to stem from the desire to allow them to go on living. What is it that leads you to do such work? Will you continue doing it in the future? “Allow them to go on living.” Thank you for putting it that way. I’m not sure if I’ll continue doing that kind of work. I probably will, if I want to or feel I should. Some stories, you can’t close the door on and leave behind just because the manuscript is finished. I guess I’ll go on doing it if I meet another one of those stories. I think my works sometimes lead to other works because I often have a hard time accepting that fiction is fabricated, made-up. There’s something that makes it difficult for me to just think that the characters don’t exist in reality. Of all the sentences you’ve written, the one I treasure the most is “Shall we sing?” in One Hundred Shadows. Whenever I think of this sen­tence, it gives me strength. I’d like to hear your thoughts on holding onto a fragile hope despite everything.  I’d rather say “possibility” than “hope.” There’s a desire in me to believe that possibilities exist. The desire doesn’t persevere on its own; it’s something I have to nurture. If I’m careless, it vanishes into thin air. Like what I talked about earlier—what happened just before the Namtaeryeong incident.  Believing in possibilities despite everything be­comes possible because other people exist; because there are other people who are affected by reality, whether I’m hoping for or despairing over something, or whether I believe in possibilities or not. You mentioned that what you give the most thought to becomes a story. What preoccupies you the most at the moment? Pain.And the mind of someone in pain, and the weakness of that mind. For example, I’m thinking thoughts like, “Why do we attack others and ourselves the most severely when we’re at our most vulnerable?”  I’m hoping that readers of KLN will read A Little Diary, recently published in Korea, when it’s eventually translated into English. I believe that through the book, they’ll be able to see where your gaze is directed. Is there anything you’d like to say about it, and to the people who fight, write, and read despite everything? A Little Diary is a collection of five months of my diary entries starting December 3, 2024. I wrote down the things I saw and heard each day, instead of observing and analyzing situations from a distance.  I keep a diary. I write down several entries a day, and from December 2024 to June this year, the political climate was the strongest theme and object of interest for me. A Little Diary is an edited compilation of those entries. Though they expose prejudices and hatred I’m ashamed to reveal to others, as well as the anxiety and anger stirring inside me, I didn’t make any big changes. I wanted to show how I spent those days as a person, and in what kind of confusion. It’s both because of a certain person who said they’d been enlightened through the martial law, and because of my hope that this book might serve as a small resource in the future. And to my fellow writers and readers. To those of you who are going back and forth between writing and reading, even today, I’d like to say, “I’m lucky to be living in the same era as you. Please keep on writing and reading.”  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:· Hwang Jungeun, “dd’s Umbrella,” Into the World of Passi (Changbi, 2012)   황정은, 「디디의 우산」, 『파씨의 입문』 (창비, 2012) · Hwang Jungeun, “d” and “There Is Nothing That Needs to Be Said,” dd’s Umbrella (tr. e. yaewon, Tilted Axis, 2024)   황정은, 「d」, 「아무것도 말할 필요가 없다」, 『디디의 우산』 (창비, 2019) · Hwang Jungeun, “Things to Come,” Years and Years (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter, 2024)   황정은, 「다가오는 것들」, 『연년세세』 (창비, 2020) · Hwang Jungeun, Diary (Changbi, 2021)   황정은, 『일기』 (창비, 2021) · Hwang Jungeun, One Hundred Shadows (tr. Yewon Jung, Erewhon Books, 2024)   황정은, 『百의 그림자』 (창비, 2023) · Hwang Jungeun, “Diary,” Literature & Society Hyphen vol. 149 (Moonji Publishing, 2025)   황정은, 「日記」, 『문학과사회&하이픈 149호』 (문학과지성사, 2025) · Hwang Jungeun, “A Day, Without Trouble,” The Quarterly Changbi vol. 207 (Changbi, 2025)   황정은, 「문제없는, 하루」, 『창작과 비평 207호』 (창비, 2025) · Hwang Jungeun, A Little Diary (Changbi, 2025)   황정은, 『작은 일기』 (창비, 2025)  

by Shin Yeonsun

Interviews

Interview with Oh Eun: What We Don’t Know Is Worth Not Knowing Well

Oh Eun, how are you? As a longtime reader and admirer of your poetry, I’m so glad to get this chance to interview you. But first things first: would you mind briefly introducing yourself to readers overseas who’ve taken an interest in Korean literature? Hello. I’m Oh Eun, and I write poems. I usually introduce myself with the phrase “I write poems,” instead of “I’m a poet” because the act of writing gives me a kind of on-the-cusp feeling. Whenever I’m writing poetry, I feel as though I’m always just about to arrive somewhere. Even after I write the final line of a poem, I always sit there scratching my head for a while. It’s because I’m still writing something in my mind. Maybe I actually have arrived somewhere, but I’m already trying to figure out where to take my next step. I’ll read you the quote on my business card. “Occasionally writing, always thinking of writing. Always living, but only occasionally feeling alive.” I feel most alive when I’m writing a poem. I’d like to ask you about your career path. You majored in sociology at Seoul National University and received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST, two majors that are not closely related. You’ve also worked at a big data company, and since then as an author, newspaper and magazine contributor, cultural director, podcast host, lecturer, and so on. Where did this surprisingly colorful experience come from? And has this ‘career of transitions’ influenced your writing in any way? Now that you ask, I wonder if I should have just stayed in my own lane. I’ve always been extremely curious, ever since I was young. I was a headstrong little kid who always wanted to try whatever someone else was doing. Luckily, if I tried it and realized it wasn’t for me, I gave up easily. Of course, that was usually because something else caught my interest.        As an adult, one of my biggest motivations has been the opportunity to try different things. Not because I was good at any of them, but because I believed that stepping into a new field and working to acclimate myself to it would make me a better person. Rather than working hard to get better at something I wasn’t good at, I wanted to understand a variety of things from all different walks of life.        Looking back, I think all those experiences had an influence on my poetry writing. I feel like dedicating myself to various fields helped cultivate my ability to see. It was a process of understanding where my line of sight (蒘鉌) comes to rest, what point of view (蒘懘) I take in looking at a thing, and what might change from a different angle of vision (蒘岆). All of this seeps into my poetry without me even realizing it. There are many traits that might be important for a poet to have, but I think my real talent is my curiosity. After your debut in Modern Poetry, your first book of poetry was The Pigs at Hotel Tassel. One of my favorite poems in that collection is “0.5.” The speaker experiences the abstract world of rational numbers, beyond whole numbers like one and two. This is realized through lines like, “you first called me your eyesight on the chart at the optometrist—in October I became the morning temperature—then I became the thickness of your pencil lead—and went to school with you everyday.” Your first collection is full of this ‘speech of possibility,’ which somehow conveys the lived experience of this kind of abstraction. In turn, your most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness, is filled with ‘undefined speech.’ What has changed between your first and most recent collections, and what hasn’t? Just as the poem “0.5” looks at the world from the perspective of the number 0.5, I’d say this effort at ‘becoming’ is one of the most important elements of my poetry writing. In The Pronoun for Nothingness, I tried to do that entirely in the form of pronouns. I think I wanted to tell the story of things that have to struggle to reveal their existence without being specifically named. The world of a pronoun can firmly fix something in place while also coming across as completely unknowable to someone who can’t follow it. That ambivalence was the impetus for these poems.        Over the past twenty years that I’ve been writing poetry, what I’ve said over and over is, “writing is hard.” Because I’ve put so much of what I want to say into poetry over that time without even realizing it, it feels like writing poetry is getting steadily more difficult. But strangely, this difficulty, this obscurity, also makes me want to write it. Because it’s hard, I want to try harder and get it right. Because it’s so obscure, I want to move closer to see more  clearly. So far, I’ve never felt that writing was anything but difficult. On the other hand, some things have changed. In the past, poetry felt like a finish line on an athletic field or a final goal to be scored, but now it feels like a vast, open ocean. A place with no center and nothing that could fully represent it. I actually can’t swim, but when I’m writing poetry, I feel like I’m happily swimming this way and that across a boundless sea. They say some poems have the prophetic quality of declaring the poet’s identity. In “He,” I pictured your face the moment I read the line, “He was called the pronoun for laughter.” It’s my opinion that, of all Korean poets, you may be the one who writes the funniest poems. Whenever I encounter your sense of humor, I feel totally weightless and free. What meaning and possibility do laughter and humor have for you as a poet? I like to laugh, so I’ve always wanted to be funny. Not that I wanted to be a comedian. I just wanted to be someone who could give people a laugh here and there. I didn’t want that laughter to come from tearing someone else down, but to bloom out of casting off my own pretensions. The way I make use of humor in poetry is definitely different from my everyday life, but I still believe in the power of laughter that grows out of literature. Laughter lightens heavy stories and helps us find warmth in cold, hard situations. Actually, maybe I started using wordplay and puns because I believed that, if I started a serious story like it was no big deal and got people to laugh a little as they read, a moment would come when I could suddenly hit them over the head with something heavy. I have a vivid memory of watching a silent Charlie Chaplin film that made me laugh hysterically until suddenly I was crying instead. That’s when I realized something. Laughter and tears are one and the same. Joy and sorrow are in cahoots. Sometimes, if you take the funniest poem and flip it around, it becomes the most unnerving or the saddest. Whenever I read one of your collections, I always keep a dictionary by my side. I have to prepare for a rush of unfamiliar words: “the stoneflue is a path beneath the bakestone floor” (“We”),  “rubicund” (“Suggestion”), “lambent,” “slatternly” (Wearing Green). Reading your poems feels like exploring the outer reaches of the native language we thought we knew so well. Almost like a linguistic telescope. Why do you take such an interest in vocabulary? To me, words are like toy blocks. Just as you can stack up blocks to build a house or a factory, when I write a poem, I combine words to build sentences and imagine those sentences coming together to form a building I’ve never seen before. Maybe each of us is in a solitary struggle to create our own unique building. In architecture, some people prioritize choosing the best plot of land, and others look for the best materials. My land and materials are all words. Putting words on top of words, words next to words, I’ve naturally formed a close relationship with the dictionary. Even words we think we know well turn out to have new aspects when we find them in the dictionary, and words we’ve never seen before sometimes taste sweet when we first roll them over on our tongues. After all, it’s because we have words that we can express our ideas, create sentences, and ultimately write poetry. I write poems in Korean, and it’s a joy, in my native language, to discover an unfamiliar face to a word I know well or recognize a familiar face on a word I’ve never seen. Many of my poems have started from just one word. Is there any special Korean word you’d like to introduce to foreign readers? If so, feel free to tell us anything you’d like about what it means, why it’s special, and how it sounds and feels. In English, being dead and buried in one’s grave is referred to as being “six feet under.” I imagine digging a hole that deep—the full height of a person—to lay a body to rest. The act of digging down into the ground might be seen as calmly reinscribing the traces left behind on Earth by the deceased. In Korea, being buried after death is sometimes referred to as “ttangbotaem” (literally “ground contribution”). It’s both a wonderful metaphor for death and a reference to the cycle of life. It expresses a sense of hope that death is not an end but a chance to contribute to the earth, from which all things grow, and the conviction that the dead will be born again as new sprouts or saplings. There’s always something mysterious to me about the word “eogam” (nuance, connotation, the texture or feel of a word; literally “word-feel”). It’s not something you can literally feel, like the weather or the changing of the seasons, but words definitely give us some kind of feeling. I’ve yet to meet anyone who knows words as accurately as you, or who uses them as freely. I want to ask about your thoughts on the word “eogam.” Eogam. That’s a great word, isn’t it? It’s always surprising that a word can convey a feeling all on its own. The way that “you” and “thou,” “blue” and “azure” are different. We already talked about the dictionary, but as a child I always wanted to say things precisely. It wasn’t enough for something to be good, I wanted to go deeper and know why and how it was good. If I write the word “soft,” I question whether that’s really the right word, and if it doesn’t measure up, I try to come up with a word to replace it . Sometimes I leave a blank for the right word, and go for a walk. And sometimes I find the word I’m looking for—the moment you realize it’s not sick, but uncomfortable, not excited, but more like carried away. The moment something is expressed in language, it gets defined, but this is also just a matter of wanting to say what I have to say as best I can. The poets I’ve met always compare you as a poet to a small child. They say that Oh Eun is a child at heart or that there is a child at the heart of Oh Eun’s poetry. In fact, your own answer to the question of who you see as your role model can be found in Wearing Green: “if I must choose one, then it must be children.” What can you tell us about your work through the keyword “childhood”? Curiosity is the reason I think of children as my role model. Children are always curious. I’ve been told I was the type of child that always asks, “Why?” I wanted to know it all. What is this place where I was born? Why do the trees change their clothes in the fall? Why does tomorrow come after today? Why are there holidays? Why is that yellow flower called “forsythia”? Why does a year have 365 days? Why do some years have 366 days? So many things to be curious about. Once I realized that asking adults had limits, I started reading diligently. But if you read, you find even more questions than answers. I think that might be why I started writing.        Children also have a transparent quality. When they play together, things like gender, nationality, religion, and family circumstances don’t hold them back. They just want to know each other, to jump and play and enjoy being together. Games resolve in victory or defeat, but play begins just because it’s fun, then occasionally stops for a moment before beginning again. For children, knowing someone’s name is all it takes to be friends, and they cherish the time and space they share together. Who wouldn’t feel admiration for a person like that? It’s so different from the way adults try to prove themselves by drawing endless distinctions with others. We often link the physical process of maturation to becoming an adult, but I think the heart and mind can grow a lot even after reaching adulthood. Someone whose heart has grown up well will be able to look at others clearly, without prejudice, and maintain a curious mind about the world. I’d also like to know about you personally. The Oh Eun I know is warm and cheerful, always laughing and making jokes. As the critic Kim Sang-hyeok has said, you’re also someone who “never simply passes by a person begging in the street or the old folks selling chocolate and gum.” How do you think this personality is revealed through or appears in your writing? I suppose that makes me think of the characters in my poems. Not only the human characters but also the animals, plants, and objects. My heart goes out to things that are always there but which no one pays attention to. The person who has a name but is never called on, the plant that appears to be growing just fine while its roots are rotting away, an object which is used every day but never gets to show its true face—theirs are the stories I want to hear. Simply striking up a conversation could seem impolite, so I cautiously imagine. It’s a process of attaching a mouth to something that’s never had a chance to tell its own story. Of course, a large portion of myself finds its way in too. Weak and squishy, liable to double over at the drop of a hat, going from hope to despair and back multiple times a day—me, myself. For me, the blank page is the place where the being is reborn. Sometimes amazing things happen, sometimes a failure becomes a way to bounce back stronger, and sometimes I search my whole life for something without ever figuring it out. I just want to tell their stories in my own way. Sad stories told humorously, funny stories told devastatingly, devastating stories told indifferently. Perhaps this is how humor functions in my poetry. A world teeming with pronouns unfolds from the pages of your most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness. Pronouns are an interesting subject, when you think about it. Nouns were created to refer to various objects, and then we use pronouns to refer back to those nouns once more. In other words, until a pronoun refers to any specific thing, it is filled only with possibility. It brings to mind the linguistic concept of the dummy subject, like the impersonal pronoun “it” in English. Your recent poetry is filled with this kind of placeholder or blank. Could you tell us more about this ‘poetic negative space’? As I wrote The Pronoun for Nothingness, it gave me the feeling of sand slipping through my fingers. Let’s say there’s a proper noun that attains existence at the moment of its naming. In the very next sentence, it is replaced by a pronoun. “It” meets with another “it.” “That” gets placed next to another “that.” Sure, the meaning isn’t difficult to gather from context, but that’s just the reader’s perspective. I wanted to tell the noun’s story—the noun whose existence fades among the endless pronouns. In order to do that, I had to go back up the chain of the naming process. How did it get that name, who gave it that name, and could it have a different name? Then I realized something. The moment we name it, the referent is trapped within that name—the way the sky unfurls in our minds, the moment we read a poem titled “Sky.” In other words, it occurred to me that naming something immediately blocks its potential to expand any further. Then I wanted to write exactly the opposite kind of poem, one that would use the pronoun to remind us of the noun, and then once more the proper noun. I wanted to go back to before the reference, back to when the possibilities for interpretation were plentiful. At that point, the blanks or ‘poetic negative space’ that you mentioned become a space to be filled in from the experiences and imagination of the writer and reader. A space that exists as emptiness, that arises again as nothingness.   In “That,” you write, “There is something / Its name escapes me […] Here I am / Not knowing its name.” It seems like not knowing something, leaving it blank, is a way to explore possibility. This refusal to inconsiderately seize control of meaning feels like a kind of linguistic democratization. Maybe laying down established meanings and facing each other blankly makes a new encounter possible. What do you think of the reading of your poetry as a ‘sociological imaginary of language’? One thing I considered carefully when writing The Pronoun for Nothingness was distance. The distance between “me” and “you,” the distance between “me” and “them,” the distance that grows within the community of “us,” and the inevitable distance between “me” and “myself.” When people feel they know for certain, they are bound to make the mistake of jumping to conclusions or judging too quickly. Even the context that has shaped our lives can act as a kind of bias, and when it does, it can be helpful to place ourselves in a state of ignorance. You have to, to exercise discernment. Since it’s important to imagine other lives and try to think from other people’s perspectives, I suppose you could call this a ‘sociological imaginary of language,’ as you put it.        Looking back over the time I’ve spent on poetry, I think ‘not knowing’ has been an important impetus for my writing. I used to think I was writing to learn what I didn’t know, but at some point, I altered that idea. Now it feels more like I write so that, whatever I don’t know, I can not know it well. The geography of my poetic practice has changed—maintaining a willing distance from the object, knowing nothing in order to clear the mind of prejudice, approaching from as transparent a state as possible. When something doesn’t reveal its essence no matter how closely you approach it, you can’t help but be humbled. You know, if you touch a soap bubble, it pops. All you can do is watch with a blank stare, cleared of all language, discipline, order, and so on. Knowing nothing. And while you’re at it, know it well. You’ve written, “I don’t write father but dad. I don’t call him father, I call him dad” (Patting). Have you noticed that your poetry collections always include the people you care about? The way a compass always points north, at the end of your poetry there is always a person. I’ve always thought that was so beautiful. “People hold people in a warm embrace” (“Good Person”). So I’ve always wanted to ask you, what are people to you? A riddle to which the answer changes every second? Of course you know the Korean proverb, “We may know the depths of the deepest waters, but not of the shallowest person.” A reasonable person may not always make reasonable choices, and a person who’s good to me may not be a good person to others. That’s why I try to empty myself and become transparent before people, as I do before poetry and before words. As much as possible, I want to be free of bias in my approach to people.        In the past, I really wanted to solve the riddle of people. But at some point, I started wanting to simply let things be and watch that subtle, complex condition. If you get too deeply involved, you can damage the essence. And if you interpret things however you like, you can only ever create a distortion. The riddle is interesting, but at the same time, you can’t know its inner workings. You can’t be too quick to guess the answer because the answer is always changing. You have to watch and wait to see each new aspect, which could appear at any time. I think that’s what makes a person someone we care about, a special someone. Looking back on your poetry, you’re always trying something new and different. I’d like to call this poetic career of self-reinvention a ‘history of courage.’ Is there a world of language you’re hoping to unfold after The Pronoun for Nothingness? Tell us about some of your new interests and themes. And, if I may ask, do you have any books in the works for us? As I take a moment to look over the poetry I’ve been writing since my last collection, it seems I’m writing a lot about ‘traces’ and ‘time differences’. But it’s hard to know while I’m still writing. I usually only realize the direction I’m moving in after a certain amount of time has passed. The process itself almost seems like a metaphor for traces and time differences, but while I can never know what scenes await me on this journey, I try to not know well. I don’t know where I’m going, but I hope there will be laughter and tears, joy and sadness there.  Translated by Seth Chandler   Ko Myeong-jae is the author of the poetry collection Closing Our Eyes When We Kiss and the prose collection When I Miss You Too Much It Snows. He is a professor of creative writing at Keimyung University.    Korean Works Mentioned:•    Oh Eun, “That,” “He,” “We,” The Pronoun for Nothingness (Moonji Publishing, 2023)     오은, 「그것」, 「그」, 「우리」, 『없음의 대명사』 (문학과지성사, 2023)•    Oh Eun, “0.5,” The Pigs at Hotel Tassel (Minumsa, 2009)     오은, 「0.5」, 『호텔 타셀의 돼지들』 (민음사, 2009)•    Oh Eun, Patting (Nanda, 2020)     오은, 『다독임』 (난다, 2020)•    Oh Eun, “Suggestion,” The Left Hand’s Feelings are Hurt (Hyundae Munhak, 2018)     오은, 「암시」, 『왼손은 마음이 아파』 (현대문학, 2018)•    Oh Eun, Wearing Green (Nanda, 2024)     오은, 『초록을 입고』 (난다, 2024)•    Oh Eun, “Good Person,” I Had a Name (Achimdal Books, 2018)      오은, 「좋은 사람」, 『나는 이름이 있었다』 (아침달, 2018)•    Kim Sang-hyeok, “The Never Misunderstood Oh-Eun,” Lyric Poetry, 2016 Winter     김상혁, 「오해받지 않는 오은」, 『서정시학』 (2016 겨울호)   1     Translator’s Note: The word “stoneflue” is a literal translation of the word dolgorae, a less common variety of traditional Korean underfloor heating. This word is a homophone for “dolphin.” The word “bakestone floor” is my coinage for gudeuljang, the flooring used in this heating system, in which “gudeul” is etymologically derived from the phrase “baked stone” or “heated stone.” This is not a rare word in Korean, but I have repurposed the English word “bakestone” to convey it in a way that should strike English readers as both familiar and unknown, which is the effect of the line as a whole.

by Ko Myeong-jae

Interviews

Interview with Kim Ae-ran: Attentive Minds and Literary Forms

To prepare for this interview, I reread all of your works in chronological order. There was something dramatic in realizing that I’ve grown up alongside your characters. I was reminded of the early 2000s and felt quite emotional. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the progression of your characters accurately reflects not just my past, but also the trajectory of Korean society and families in the twenty-first century. It’s also fascinating that your novels have inherited elements from Korean literature of the 1990s—small stories, lonely selves, preferences, and personality, just to name a few. With your novels, you’ve proven the paradox that even the most private stories are still universal and connected to society. Could you share more about how your writing journey began in relation to these themes? Three keywords come to mind: “noodle shop,” “room,” and “theatre.” I’ll explain each of these briefly.        My mother ran a noodle shop out of our home in the countryside for over twenty years. In her shop, I learned that cooking is a form of labor long before it transforms into virtue or duty. I also got to see firsthand what it meant to be a proud, economically independent woman. The people who came to the restaurant were people from all walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds. At the time I hated sharing with those customers our small home where we ate and slept, but now I realize that it was a precious experience for my development as an author.        By “room,” I’m talking as much about a physical place as an economic class. My early work inevitably contains many of my personal experiences. As a young author, I used to be embarrassed by the smallness of my stories about “home” and that “room.” But not anymore. Much like pointillism, small stories in numbers can become the brushstrokes for a vast sky.        Lastly, I studied theatre in college. While in school, I saw many performances barely make it to the stage. In the process, my peers and I learned how to accept each other’s imperfections and how to keep our promise to the audience. During that time, I also learned how to look for the meaning of life without relying on a personal god, and how to love without idolizing the other person. Although I can’t say for sure that I was aware of this at the time. It’s interesting that your experience in theatre has seeped into your novels. I can’t help but think that this is also related to your writing and literature. Noodle shops and rooms are especially present in works like Run, Dad! and Mouthwatering. One thing that plays an important role in the world-building of these early works is what you might call a “resentment-free reconstruction of reality and active imagination.” But in your works in the 2010s and beyond, I think this becomes more complicated. For example, in My Brilliant Life and Vapor Trail, you seem more aware of the harshness or negative aspects of reality. I wonder if this indicates a kind of shift. Or as writer Kim Yeonsu once stated, perhaps laughter and tears all come from the same place. In that sense, something that was latent in your early works has now emerged to the surface. I’m curious what the context behind that change was. I’ve always wanted to possess a sense of humor that demonstrates a deep understanding of life. I hope I’ve achieved that, at least to some extent. Still, it’s true that in striving for that, I had started to smile less. But after the sinking of the MV Sewol, my pessimism returned to faint optimism, and then after the COVID-19 pandemic, I started to sympathize with Rebecca Solnit who said that both pessimism and optimism are forms of certainty about the future. I once read that certainty interferes with our decision-making. And yet, so long as we cling to a certain amount of hope, it doesn’t so much give us a good answer, but rather, a difficult one—like a cracked jar that leaks light to reveal the dignity of humanity within. I think Korean literature of late can be split into two periods: literature that was written before the sinking of the MV Sewol, and literature that was written after. When Kim Yeonsu wrote about you, I felt a warmth inside as I sensed the unique and complex connection between you two—awkward and ambivalent, yet somehow friendly. What does the term “contemporary author” mean to you? I know writing is ultimately a solitary act, but I think that relationships between writers must be significant. What first comes to mind is the Korean phrase “a hill to lean on.” I also imagine this network of writers as a forest. I’m happy to know that my work is not the first shovel in a barren landscape but rather a tree or leaf swaying in unison with other trees and leaves in a forest cultivated by other writers. Within that forest, I sometimes feel the winds of history, and at other times, I’m shaken and humbled by those same winds. Eventually, I may decay and be absorbed into the earth, but that, too, is the way of nature. Contemporary writers are the people with whom I share that uncertain destiny. I find it interesting that from the beginning of your career, many of your main characters have been children. Your newest full-length novel, A Lie Among Truths, also features a young boy. I can’t help but think that there must be some special reason for this. Perhaps you have a particular affection for coming-of-age journeys? The young characters in my early works were very interested in themselves. After all, one must resolve their own problems before they can see others and begin to talk about “we.” While writing my latest novel, a certain idea occurred to me: Growing up is all about changing perspectives. I also think that maturation doesn’t have to be about going through the traditional rites of passage; it can happen gradually over a long span of time. So, in this novel, I decided to have my characters initially obsessed with their own wounds, then slowly I let them begin to see the sorrow and wounds of others as intensely as their own. People tend to think growing up is about becoming bigger, but it’s actually about becoming smaller, because the smaller we get, the bigger our world becomes. I’m paraphrasing Jeon Seung-min, of course, from his book of essays, Reading with Intent. Personally, even though I may not have grown up to become a more sophisticated writer, I’ve become someone who can observe the world and people with patience—something for which I am thankful.  Since your last novel, My Brilliant Life, I’d been waiting with great anticipation for A Lie Among Truths. And it was just as moving as your previous work. Of course, this novel is centered around lies. In the line “One secret helps another secret,” the word “secret” can implicitly be seen as a close cousin with “lie.” Now that I think about it, your first novel, My Brilliant Life, also revolves around the hope and disappointment caused by a certain lie. But in your latest work, I think lying becomes much richer. What significance does lying have for you right now? And what is its relationship to storytelling? To me, lies are even bigger than fiction or storytelling. After all, a novel is essentially an author’s carefully crafted lie. As has long been known, lies in literature are used as a method to protect the truth. In other words, some truths cannot be conveyed without the use of storytelling. Conversely, some lies only feel like they are true because they have been carefully structured and narrativized. It’s a subtle but important distinction. I try to resist the urge to resort to an easy narrative while struggling to preserve the driving force of the story. If a story feels too comfortable to me, I shift my perspective to make sure I’m an honest liar. Another interesting aspect of A Lie Among Truths is the introduction of non-human characters, which is something new in your body of work. Rather than simply serving as a plot device, they seem to reflect a fascinating expansion or shift in worldviews. For example, all three of the children who are the main characters suffer their own wounds and live precarious daily lives; yet, they have non-humans that they must look after and protect. I wanted to hear more about this from you. I wanted to give these children, for whom family is a painful burden they must carry, a different type of family with its own meaning. After pondering how to ensure the children weren’t put in forced positions of salvation while also not relegating them to a place of meaninglessness, I came up with the idea of a companion animal. I didn’t want to overly anthropomorphize or idealize these animals, so I went with a lizard. I deliberately placed it in contrast to the dog, which represents devotion. While humans have long cherished dogs, lizards (like snakes) have been despised by humans since the dawn of time. Of course, snakes and lizards are different, but they share a common history of neglect and mistreatment by humans. By juxtaposing the dog, a symbol of love and loyalty, with the snake, a creature that doesn’t even know people hate it (as movie critic Kim Hye-ri puts it), I wanted to strike a balance and step away from an anthropocentric perspective. Your desire to avoid anthropomorphism and idealization resonates with me. The last sentence of your book also left a lasting impression on me: “I could have chosen not to return from the dream, but I did.” This is almost the exact opposite of the last sentence of “Who Sets Off Fireworks on the Beach Without Thinking?” from your first collection, Run, Dad!: “This might all be a dream, but just like the wind that traveled thousands of kilometers across the northern pacific to meet me, I must meet that dream.” In other words, the young character from twenty years ago yearned to “meet a dream,” but now, this more recent young character wishes to return from a dream. Why has the meaning of dreams changed for your young characters? I once said in an acceptance speech that, “What matters more than the height of the leap is the place where you land.” I thought I was showing humility and a young author’s mettle, but now that I think about it, it wasn’t that I was trying to hide my own vanity, but rather some fear I had. After all, to land somewhere, to come back to Earth after a great leap, takes a lot of strength, effort, and courage. And to land somewhere, you first need height. You must experience that height. If we can call that height a dream or a fantasy, then perhaps what my early works captured was the sensation of measuring and savoring the distance between the sky and the earth with my body. In contrast, the arc of landing seems to be contained in my more recent works. In an interview, you mentioned that you write your characters while imagining them ten years in the future. It occurred to me that the characters in your latest novel could be both future versions of characters from previous novels, and past versions of characters from future novels. Are there any characters from past works that you would like to rewrite? I’ve sometimes caught myself continuing or rewriting previous short stories of mine. For example, “Knife Marks” and “Covering Hands” both explore motherhood from different angles. “Beginning of Winter” and “Like Raindrops” both explore the grieving process through the motif of applying wallpaper. The youth from “A Proud Life,” who cries because his book gets wet in the rain, becomes a member of the older generation in “A Good Neighbor,” willingly discarding perfectly good books. I plan to continue observing these character transformations.  I also want to ask you about some of the short stories you’ve published after Summer Outside. The two works that come to mind, “Foreign Body Sensation” and “Home Party,” seem more socially aware than Summer Outside. In particular, I think you highlight the hypocrisy and contradictions behind the desire for a middle-class life, a so-called “standard life.” By pointing out the fact that we’re all complicit in this hypocrisy, I think these works are a form of satire directed at the self. In this sense, your work seems to possess a strong sense of physicality as it is firmly rooted in this world. Do you think this rootedness is related to your attitude toward fiction? When I first started out, the “physicality” of my works was mostly tied to a character’s sense of daily life and their humor. But recently, it has also manifested in this critique of “complicity,” as you put it. I think this is because of my interest in bodies that awaken, that become courageous within their limitations and imperfections. These bodies take many forms—dying bodies, drunk bodies, desiring bodies, bodies that are socially conscious. When these “embodied” people make unexpected choices, I feel great humility. A person’s weight is not measured by their achievement in a single era, but by the sum of their contradictions, flaws, failures, and journeys throughout their lifetime. That is what we call life. At some point in time, various media elements—TV, internet, emails, webtoons—began to be highlighted and used as narrative devices in your novels. Of course, these forms of media shape stories in their own way. In this day and age, when these different forms of media compete against each other, what, in your view, is the significance of the novel? And what do you think the novel has contributed—or is contributing—to humanity’s story? In the past, I used to think that the virtue of novels was in their content. Empathy, understanding, imagining the Other—things like that. But these days, I wonder if the true value of literature and reading lies not in content, but in its form. Of course, I also learn a lot through modern media, just like everyone else. I’m often impressed not only by the narrative techniques they use but also by their themes and content. But I’m still skeptical of YouTube and social media, the two most dominant forms of media right now. I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned, despite being neither young nor old.        I should also mention that, with the rise of YouTube and Instagram, there has been a rise in people talking about themselves. Historically, there have never been so many “first-person perspectives.” But with so many “I”s in the world, why has self-alienation become so prevalent? In this age where self-obsession and self-alienation coexist, how can we engage with second- and third-person worlds in a healthy way? Is there a way to be an agent without being a main character? I often ask myself these questions because I, just like everyone else, am not free from such influences. That’s why I think attention has become the moral issue of this era. In a world of dopamine addiction, the strength and time to focus on one object, one issue, might itself be the key to living ethically. This makes me think anew about the importance of literature and reading. I’m fascinated by your comment about “being an agent without being a main character.” It almost seems loosely connected to your affection for adverbs over nouns. I am reminded of your discussion of adverbs in the book of essays, A Good Name to Forget. Teachers often warn students not to use adverbs too often because they are not essential to sentences and can lead to superfluous writing. And now that I think about it, as I write these questions and consider how they will be translated, I unconsciously try to minimize my use of adverbs. Could you share more about your deep fondness for adverbs? When I was young, I read a lot of writing manuals. While reading those books, I was often scolded by the authors for breaking their writing rules—authors who had never even met me! What I should have taken as mere guidelines became absolute truth, and this left me feeling discouraged. My essay about adverbs was my lighthearted rebellion against those early teachers. It was just a small act of defiance, but I got a real kick out of it. In all seriousness, however, adverbs do lead to a lot of wasted verbiage. Perhaps that’s why it’s more apparent in writing than in spoken communication. I suppose my point was that adverbs are a necessary waste. I wanted to defend vibrancy, playfulness, flexibility—all of which require adverbs. Ironically, the short stories and novels I personally admire are those with restrained poeticism. But even someone who hates vegetables can become a vegetarian. Perhaps what I love so much is not adverbs themselves, but rather what you might call the adverbial. And maybe that’s why I’ve never quite connected with rigid, “noun-centered” writing that asserts absolute certainty and claims a monopoly on the truth. The adverbial definitely seems at odds with today’s demands for cost-effectiveness, speed, and stimulation. The meaning of family in your novels has also undergone significant transformations. In a 2017 interview, you described family as three things: the first Other we encounter in life, the place where we practice emotions, and a pole that helps us jump over bars. If I asked you what family means to you now, would you answer differently? I doubt there are many people who have a smooth narrative of their own childhood. It’s my guess that most of us live with certain gaps and omissions, regardless of age or nationality. I often write about children who must fill in the holes their parents could not. In those stories, the tools of humor, imagination, and lying were very useful to me. Conversely, I have sometimes been too idealistic when depicting parents and children, attempting to erase feelings of guilt over parental devotion and sacrifice. I guess I needed an indirect method through which to engage with reality. That’s probably why I got a good laugh when I heard writer Ko Mi Sook say recently that family is a hotbed of lies. In my early years, I frequently used child narrators, but now, in my forties, I have become responsible for looking after my own parents. Through this, I’ve come to accept that we don’t need to idealize family to understand or care for it. At the same time, we don’t necessarily have to be apathetic about the empty spaces inside us, either. In your short story “They Said Annyeong,” which is featured in this issue of KLN, there is a scene in which the main characters part ways without being able to say goodbye. I guess I’m in the same situation right now. But before we leave, I want to ask you one last question: What are three works of yours that you want international readers to know about and why? Limiting myself to short stories, I guess I would suggest a few of my early works as well as my more recent ones. Two of these, in fact, will be included in my fifth short story collection, set to be published this year. “Home Party” is one.In writing this story, I wanted to tackle the topic of money during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or more specifically, I wanted to write about “social currency” and the parties held during times of isolation by the people who possessed it. No setting requires more social performances than parties, and what better character to play such a role than a struggling actor? That’s the idea behind that story. Then there’s “They Said Annyeong.”In the English language, subjects and objects are relatively clear. If only life were as simple. The main character of this story feels the wonder and angst of navigating between one’s mother tongue and a foreign language. A lonely woman, she uses learning a new language as an excuse to learn about life. Finally, “Who Sets Off Fireworks on the Beach without Thinking?”Throughout my career, I’ve written stories in only three different styles: writing a story I know in a familiar way, writing a story I don’t know in a familiar way, and writing a story I don’t know in an unfamiliar way. This novel was written in the last—and least frequent—style. That’s why, whenever I read it, I feel a strange mix of nostalgia and liberation. It’s a fun and beautiful story about two characters in the middle of the night battling for narrative control over a single story. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert  Kim Mijung is a literary critic and lecturer at Soongsil University. She is the author of Moving Constellations, a collection of literary criticism, and the co-author of How Do Post-War East Asian Women’s Narratives Converge? She has also translated The Power of Affect.  Korean Works Mentioned:•   Kim Ae-ran, Run, Dad! (Changbi, 2005)    김애란, 『달려라 아비』 (창비, 2005) •   Kim Ae-ran, Mouthwatering (Moonji, 2007)    김애란, 『침이 고인다』 (문학과 지성사, 2007) •   Kim Ae-ran, My Brilliant Life (tr. Chi-Young Kim, Forge Books, 2021)    김애란, 『두근두근 내 인생』 (창비, 2011) •   Kim Ae-ran, Vapor Trail (Moonji, 2012)    김애란, 『비행운』 (문학과 지성사, 2012) •   Kim Ae-ran, Summer Outside (Munhakdongne, 2017)    김애란, 『바깥은 여름』 (문학동네, 2017) •   Kim Ae-ran, A Good Name to Forget (Yolimwon, 2019)    김애란, 『잊기 좋은 이름』 (열림원, 2019)  •   Kim Ae-ran, A Lie Among Truths (Munhakdongne, 2024)    김애란, 『이중 하나는 거짓말』 (문학동네, 2024) •   Kim Ae-ran, et al, Collection of Stories on the Theme of Music (Franz, 2024)    김애란 등 『음악소설집』 (프란츠, 2024) •   Kim Yeonsu, “What Kind of Person Is Kim Ae-ran?” Literature and Society (Moonji, 2012)          김연수, 「김애란 씨는 어떤 사람인가요?」, 『문학과사회』 (문학과지성사, 2012)

by Kim Mijung

Interviews

Interview with Jin Eun-young: Buttons from the Gift Giver

As a long-time fan, it’s an honor to interview a poet whose work I’ve followed so closely. I’m aware you’ve had some big changes in your life recently. Going from Seoul to Gwangju is a big move. The scenery outside your office window must have changed a great deal as well. I’m curious how the new office looks, where you’ve placed your new desk. Could you set the scene for us? I always put my desk next to the window. The view from my previous office was a concrete jungle, a bunch of new apartments, but now I have some old trees and a forest outside the window. I like old things, things that are getting old. I’ve been pretty happy with everything, but there were some difficulties at first. The sunlight is so strong. When you’re in the middle of the city, the shadows of the tall buildings act like a curtain for most of the day. But here, maybe because we’re a bit higher up on the mountainside, it’s so bright and hot during the day that I couldn’t sit at my desk. One wall is entirely taken up by a window, but since this office was vacant for two years, there weren’t any blinds for the first week. Whenever I sat down to write, I’d start muttering to myself about the brightness. I couldn’t wait for the blinds to be installed.      Then I got these charcoal rolling shades that were so dark they completely blocked out the sunlight. When the shades were down, you could develop a photograph inside the office, like a darkroom. It was so dark it was suffocating, and I was still muttering under my breath about the lighting. Then I tore some pictures out of an old art magazine and stuck them up on that wall of light, like patches of stained glass. I just stuck them up anywhere, so they took the edge off the sunlight, and the view outside was still visible through the thin pages. I’ve had a lot of repair workers and technicians and other people coming and going because it’s an old office and needs some work done. Sometimes I wonder if they think it’s weird when they come in and see those loose scraps of paper stuck up all over that big, beautiful window.      I think that’s how literature and art have always been for me. Figuring out my own way to resolve some kind of lighting issue. I need light to live, but if the light gets too intense, I feel like I might kill somebody. But when I take some sentences and start loosely sticking them together, the light peeking out between the lines protects me. It helps me grow and bloom. You majored in philosophy before going on to lecture at Korea Counseling Graduate University (KCGU), exploring literature’s power to heal. Alongside this, you’ve done work in translation as well. From a distance, philosophy, counseling, and translation are three distinct fields, but it seems like they all revolve around the central axis of poetry, which draws them in together. Does poetry play different roles in each of these fields? What is similar or different about poetry as a part of philosophy, of counseling, or of translation? I suppose I have been doing a bit of all three for the past ten years now. Objectively, it’s been just as you described—poetry as a part of philosophy, as a part of psychological counseling, as a part of translation. Yet in my heart I think it feels the other way around—philosophy as a part of poetry, counseling as a part of poetry, translation as a part of poetry.      I’ve told this story elsewhere, but I was a math and science student in high school. I majored in philosophy because of an older student’s advice that a good poet must be well-versed in philosophy. These days, I often tell my students about Baudelaire’s dream of creating new clichés. It’s every poet’s dream to create a single word, a single expression that’s never been said before, but which then becomes so well-used that it turns into a cliché. But this isn’t simply a desire to create a novel phrase that everyone loves. The poet aspires to present the world with a gift: the gift of a new, different world. It may be a world for those who delight in the small and trivial, or it may be something more massive, but we all have this ambition. It is philosophy that allows us to imagine the world we will call forth, to think through and reflect upon the precise way to approach that world. Therefore, all poets study philosophy. Of course, our methods of study differ. Since I majored in philosophy, I take a more exegetical or argumentative approach within the philosophy discourse, but others seem to think philosophically by examining and reflecting upon their own writing.      Counseling as a part of poetry has been with me ever since I started writing poems. The high school I went to was trying to make a name for itself as the new, elite college test-prep school in the neighborhood, so they had no arts and literature track. The atmosphere was like, if you got caught reading one of the classics during study hall, you could expect corporal punishment. I wasn’t even allowed to enjoy literature as much as I’d have liked, but I learned through experience that when I was depressed and exhausted, just reading a poem to myself, mouthing it under my breath, made me feel so much better. In other words, reading and writing poetry was a kind of self-therapy for me. Weak, tender things will always find a way to make a little hole to hide in, right? This world is so full of weak, tender things that it feels like a sponge, so full of little holes. In twelve years at KCGU, reading and writing poetry with all sorts of students, I’ve really come to think so. Some drill their hole with sound, some with color, some with love. Each of us can hide in a hole drilled by art and humanity. When it’s not reading or listening but writing and performing, perhaps it’s less like drilling and more like nibbling a hole with the incisors of letters and music. You have to gnaw the hole open and shape it yourself, so it’s not easy at first, but we all have incisors.      I think of translation as a kind of training in earnestly and carefully approaching something unfamiliar to you. I began translating because I wanted to know more about the poet Sylvia Plath, who lived in a world I knew so little about. “Please just get divorced and start a new life!” That’s what I used to say to my mom when I was a child, starting when I was in the upper grades of elementary school. So it was a struggle for me to understand women who cry out in anguish while staying in an unhappy marriage. Whenever we hear a scream, no matter whose it is, we have an immediate reaction, “Oh my god. Someone’s in pain. Shouldn’t we get them out of that situation?” But understanding someone means to know the specifics of their pain, and to know the deep-seated reason they’ve confined themself there. It means that even if you wouldn’t defend such a life, you accept that for this other person, who’s different from you, it is their way of being, and they are in pain. And you don’t draw facile conclusions or judgments. When I translated Sylvia Plath’s poetry, I sat and thought over what this life I hadn’t lived might have been like. When I read her diaries and letters, I felt a little closer to that pain I hadn’t known. In this sense, writing a poem is like translating a piece of the world. In the case of your own poetry, what do you think is most important when it’s translated and introduced in another language? It may be impossible to prevent things from being lost in the translation process, but is there anything you believe absolutely must be conveyed intact and without distortion? The order of the words that make up the images. Even if the target language sentences don’t come out as smoothly, I’d like the order of the words to be kept as close to their positions in the source text as possible. It’s usually quite difficult to translate that way because word order is different, but I feel it’s the only way to convey the image that the poet is trying to show the reader. The images in your poetry are so distinct that it feels like you must always have on your desk a scale for weighing words, a temperature gauge, and gem-cutting tools. The “new clichés” Baudelaire spoke of make their presence felt throughout your collections. I can feel the senses within my body become vividly awake when I imagine lines like “Like a snail’s eye, the gentle day” (“Birthday”) or “Like a little silver drum being played, your palm is tapped upon by the rain” (“Proposal”). It seems that images—the images you hope will be carried over as closely as possible and never be lost in translation—truly play an important role in your poetic world. The title of your recent prose collection is Although I’m Not Right for the World. As soon as I heard the title, I had the urge to complete the sentence and felt a very strong pull. What would it mean to be “just right for this world”? Is it even possible? What were the “someone’s sentences that saved [you]”? The book brought out so many questions. How do you understand the word “world”? What does it mean for us to be reading and writing there? In a sense, I think the idea of being just right for this world is incredibly frightening. That makes it sound as if the world is a jigsaw puzzle where everyone will fit perfectly if they just find their place. I get a sense of compulsivity from that worldview. Even just one person not fitting in puts an end to such imaginings of the world as a jigsaw puzzle. After all, in a basic sense, the world is a concept meant to encompass everyone, so if even one piece doesn’t fit, the complete, single picture becomes impossible. And the number of people who don’t fit into this world is certainly more than one. In fact, almost everyone doesn’t fit. Each one of us is a differently-shaped piece, and one of my sides might match up to another of your sides—in the plural sense of you. There are always many gaps between the pieces. For instance, I like Hannah Arendt’s books, but I don’t really like the stories about her love affairs. When she was a student, she had a relationship with Heidegger, who was her philosophy professor, and she met him again sometime much later. When he got sulky that her work was more popular than his in America, do you know what she said? She remarked that he’d been under the impression she couldn’t even count to three. When I read that in one of the biographies, I was shocked. How could these be the words of such a brave and critical female philosopher? How could she have fallen in love with a man who treated her like she was so stupid she couldn’t count to three? She’s not a match for me. But no, then again, she is a match for me. When I sense her idealizing Greek culture, she’s not a match for me. When she’s unrestrained in her criticism of Zionism, she is a match.      Writing is the work of creating contact so that these temporary and partial matches arise. Literature seems to have the ability to take parts and pieces that have always been so far apart they’d never bump into each other and magnetize them together. Right now, we’re connected. But we could fall apart. But that’s okay. We can be reconnected again. Of course, this process isn’t always as easy or pleasant as it sounds, but good works of literature always bring me some relief through the knowledge that these moments of contact and rupture aren’t only happening to me. Your books often introduce readers to quotes from foreign authors. Your first collection Seven Word Dictionary includes quotes from Nicanor Parra, Louis Aragon, and Rainer Maria Rilke; We, Day by Day from Pasternak, Nietzsche, and Spinoza; Stolen Song from Maurice Blanchot, César Vallejo, and Antonio Muñoz Molina. I Love You Like an Old Street opens with a line from a Zbigniew Herbert poem, “Those touched by misfortune are always alone,” and then lines from John Berger, Dylan Thomas, and Emily Dickinson open each section. All four of your poetry collections have three parts, each beginning with a quote from a foreign writer, so it seems this format has become a distinctive characteristic of your work as a poet. Do you plan on keeping this format for your next collection? Is there a reason you like to draw on quotes? What are your thoughts on these lines from other writers? It isn’t intentional. It might just be that I write too little, so it’s hard to pull together a collection with more than three parts. The lines I use as epigraphs are all lines that I love, of course. An epigraph usually appears at the beginning of a piece of writing to indicate the topic or theme, so it’s meant to suggest to readers the mood or thematic concerns I had when the poems were written or collected. I’m saying, “Here’s what I’ll be talking about.” But the reason I’m so attached to that style is really more of an intense and fundamental desire to read the quoted books together with those who would befriend me. It’s as if I want to say, “There is a more beautiful and dazzling world out there than the one I’ve captured in this book. I know there is!” Just as a road connects to other roads in endless procession, I hope the words of other writers quoted in my books will serve as a key to open the door to those writers’ books, in continuous connection to yet other worlds. I confess that, in my own reading, I’ve followed many of those quoted lines to the joy of discovering and falling in love with new authors I’d never heard of. Thanks to that experience, I’ve become a member of a reading community that transcends time and space. Since we’re on the topic, would you introduce us to any new works you’ve found recently, or any new meanings you’ve discovered in re-reading something? If not a specific work, I’m curious what sorts of things you’ve been reading. Any trends or keywords? I want to keep up with your thought. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the spirit of gift-giving. I wrote about this in my recent essay collection as well, but reading Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions led me to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I picked it up because Atwood strongly recommends it as required reading to young aspiring artists regardless of genre. It made me rethink what it means to engage in relationships openly rather than dually. In my twenties I thought of myself as someone who would repay a kindness no matter what it took. Whatever love I received from someone, I thought I would give back even more. It made me feel proud to think like that. I think it was a kind of psychological strategy to accept that I was indebted to someone else’s love to sustain my existence. But as time went by, I could never sufficiently pay back all the people who’d given me love, and those people never expected a reward either. With love and kindness, giving back only when you’ve received and taking only when you’ve given is fundamentally a kind of exchange relation. As Hyde points out in his book, not only will that not change the world, the world couldn’t even function properly that way. Without the bountiful gifts which the sun gives to plants, and which plants give to us, we couldn’t even exist. But I don’t compensate the sun that’s shining down warmly on me right now, nor the delicious plants that I’m chewing on.      On days when I feel alone, I get great strength and consolation from the words of Szymborska, Herbert, Bachmann, and Berger, but it’s not as if I can write works as great as theirs to move and console them in return. There is no way to compensate them. All that you and I can do, as poets, is write and do our best to offer a single line as a gift to give someone else courage on a day when they are struggling. When I think of how gifts keep passing onward to other places in that way, flowing endlessly among many people rather than back and forth between just two, I feel much more generous. In my twenties, I was very fearful of inconveniencing or becoming indebted to someone. To myself, I insisted this was because I was a strong, independent person, but really it was because I couldn’t accept our fundamental vulnerability, our ultimate dependence on others. But reading Hyde’s argument of the gift economy as a kind of universal flow—one that may appear to have been cut off by capitalism since the modern era, but which in fact can’t be severed so long as the cycle of life continues on Earth—I felt my own dark anxiety about the future lift and brighten. I want to live like a plant. Vegetarians eat plants but not animals, despite the fact that both are living things. I’ve heard it explained that the ability of plants to give gifts is greater than that of animals. Lettuce and herbs grow back quickly even if we pick a leaf for breakfast. Plants can preserve themselves even as they share with other beings. It’s said the Buddha returned in one life as a rabbit and offered up his body to feed a hungry tiger, but since even thinking about such dedication and sacrifice could be too much for us, let’s try to live like the plants, which preserve the self even as they give freely of the self as a gift. I’ve been trying to view whatever comes my way in the new, generous perspective of a plant. I wish I could be more like a plant as well, with that gift-giving ability. But in the world of capital, where almost everything is quantitatively assessed and exchanged, it occurs to me that self-preservation isn’t as easy as one might think. In other words, whatever that thing is—the thing you’re most afraid to lose, the self you want to preserve no matter what—if you want to hold onto it, you have to be so reactive and cling to it with all your might. I wonder what that thing—the self—is for you, whether in poetry or in life. When I spoke of self-preservation, I wasn’t thinking of a self that exists as some fixed characteristic. On the contrary, when I speak of preserving the self, what I mean is sustaining a passion for reinventing the self through ceaseless contact with the world. If we think of a stem sprouting from a seed or leaves budding on a branch, we can feel a kind of passion rising ever outward from the self and toward something else. Of course, this passion isn’t truly everlasting. We can’t preserve the self infinitely. Everything comes to an end. But until then, I hope I will always retain within me the ability to transform the self by taking small steps towards other beings. I remember a line from The Gift: “We stand before a […] burning house and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf.” The author is watching a wooden house burn down, and it feels to him as if the trees are returning all the light they’ve taken in back to the world—it’s quite an epiphany. Of course, when we then see forests burning for months on end, the first worry that comes to mind is the climate crisis. It’s as if the trees are engaging in a great self-immolation, a stern rebuke of humanity for taking everything from nature and never offering any gift in return. I Love You Like An Old Street often brought to mind the faces and expressions of death. There are many different keywords by which to read your poetry, but I’d venture that one important foundation of your poetic world is loss and mourning. In your essay “Amid Emptiness, a Sad Person,” you write that after a loved one dies, our “way of loving” them changes, and you say that we need another “experiment in love,” quoting Megan Devine. That left an impression on me. In our times, what is the shape of love required by a community of sadness? Tell us more about your thoughts on loss, mourning, and love’s extension. Actually, in your poem “Incomplete”, you write that “to cross the valley, what’s needed is not two legs,” but “a buttonhole-sized belief is enough.” I like those lines. What is the buttonhole-sized belief we need in order to cross the valley of death? Could it be the belief that we are still connected? A sense of connection, that we are still in touch with the dead. Megan Devine’s observation that when a loved one dies, love isn’t over, but the way we love them changes, means that we are still connected to them, but the way we are connected is different. When I teach Heidegger’s Being and Time, I tell my students about his concept of death’s singularity, but actually, when I think of my own personal experience and the people around me who’ve lost loved ones, it seems that death can’t truly separate us. Loss is always the loss of one part of a person. Not the whole. We’ve lost their body. Of course, this loss is fatally, violently painful. We can no longer see or touch them. But we haven’t lost everything. We continue to feel and remember their being as we love them. This is why John Berger says absence is not nothingness. Their being is with us. In contrast, a person who is still alive and breathing, but with whom we have no connection, is so much further away from us than the dead, so much closer to nothingness. If we hold on to this small belief—that we are connected, that we must be connected, this buttonhole-sized belief—we can continue to remember and record our loved ones who’ve crossed into death. And we can also avoid excluding, neglecting, and turning away from our living and breathing neighbors.      One of the reasons I like your phrase “buttonhole-sized belief” is that it’s connected in my mind to the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Buttons.” The poem is set in a dense forest, where the truth of a tragic massacre of young military officers forty years earlier has finally come to light. Because so much time has passed, their bodies have grown soft, and even their uniforms are worn and frayed, but the buttons alone rise from the earth where they’re buried, now threaded into the forest, and bear witness to their existence. I felt a jolt of surprise to think of buttons so hard and resolute, fastening together the twin lapels of existence, life and death. A button can never be independent. Its being bears witness to connection in and of itself. A buttonhole is even smaller than a button, yet it is the necessary condition that allows the button to fasten to some other being, or for something to connect to a button, like the empty hole of our existence. We must believe that there are always a few more holes to connect you and me, in order to work toward that connection. I suppose that’s the button that connects the two of us as well. I wish I could hold it tight in my hand as I drift off to sleep. It’s one of a kind, a button of warmth. And now we’ve arrived at our last question. How do feel about the word “future”? What steps are you taking, and in what direction, for the work ahead? I don’t think I can say I’m an optimist. But since you’re the one asking, I’d like to give a warmhearted answer. Let’s imagine an enormous coat to heat up this ice-cold world. On that coat would be an infinity of buttons. How could I make such an enormous coat myself? When you feel that sense of desperation, focus on just a single button. That button is fastened to the coat, so as long as you have that one thing, you’re connected to the world. Recently, I was reading a book by Rebecca Solnit in which she explains that the slogan “the personal is political” originally meant that the social structure defining individuals is so much more powerful than each person’s individual life that individualistic understandings are impossible. I agree deeply, but it occurs to me that the most vivid way to approach that structure is to focus on the pain of someone you know. In other words, when we can properly connect with their pain, we are releasing or fastening one of the buttons that can save the world. I hope to do so through poetry. Translated by Seth Chandler KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:•   Jin Eun-young, Although I’m Not Right for the World (Maum Sanchaek, 2024)    진은영, 『나는 세계와 맞지 않지만』 (마음산책, 2024)•   Jin Eun-young, Seven Word Dictionary (Moonji, 2003)    진은영, 『일곱 개의 단어로 된 사전』 (문학과지성사, 2003)•   Jin Eun-young, We, Day by Day (tr. Daniel Parker and YoungShil Ji, White Pine Press, 2018)    진은영, 『우리는 매일매일』 (문학과지성사, 2008)•   Jin Eun-young, Stolen Song (Changbi 2012)    진은영, 『훔쳐가는 노래』 (창비, 2012)•   Jin Eun-young, I Love You Like an Old Street (Moonji, 2022)    진은영, 『나는 오래된 거리처럼 너를 사랑하고』 (문학과지성사, 2022)•   Jin Eun-young, “Amid Emptiness, a Sad Person” (Monthly Munhakdongne No. 114)    진은영, 『허공 속의 슬픈 사람』 (문학동네 계간지 114호)•   An Heeyeon, “Incomplete,” Walking in the Carrot Patch (Munhakdongne, 2024)    안희연, 「미결」, 『당근밭 걷기』 (문학동네, 2024) An Heeyeon began her poetic career in 2012 when she was awarded the Changbi New Poets Award. Her poetry collections include When Your Sorrow Cuts in, Within What is Called Night, What I Learned on the Summer Hill, and Walking in the Carrot Patch. She has also published prose collections, including House of Words and When You’re Loved, When Night Grows Deep. She was awarded the 2016 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature.

by An Heeyeon