Interviews

Lingering Long and Delving Deep into the Unseeable

Across the many novels and stories you have published, from your debut collection Falling in Paul to your most recent Everything About Spring Nights, it seems you have always spoken about love. Readers have been captivated by the fluency with which you narrate the expansiveness of our relationships with others while depicting inner pain through images of light. In your author’s note for Summer Villa, you wrote that “there is nothing else we can rely on but understanding and love.” Is love still the most important life value in your work, or have you perhaps discovered a more important value in the meantime?  I never consciously thought of myself as writing about love all this time, but now that you mention it, I suppose I was. After all, we can’t help but call it “love” when humans, who can only ever see the world from their own perspectives, make an effort to understand others despite that limita­tion. As I write, I often find myself growing attached to the stories of those who are striving in that way—people who somehow find the strength time and again to reach out to someone or stay true to their own desires, pushing forward in life even when they believe their efforts may be in vain. If those efforts can also be called “love,” then I don’t think I’ve found a value more important to me.   Your early works primarily explored inner solitude and subtle rifts in relationships. The repeated use of the word “falling” is indicative of this. What stood out even more was a chilling sense of the impossibility of commu­nication. In your recent work, however, your gaze seems to have shifted from “me” toward “us.” This is especially true of the stories in Everything About Spring Nights, including “Radiant Days,” which depicts an elderly woman’s inner turmoil, and “When the Light Reaches,” which delicately sheds light on the various forms of life within a community—the subtle emotions between women, questions of gender identity, and the issue of care. It’s been quite a long time since your literary debut in 2011. Could you comment on the conscious shift you made toward the possibility of solidarity with others and communal ideals?  Looking back, when I first started writing, I think I was more interested in expressing the imperfections of language itself. Even before I became a writer, I was extremely sensitive to the fissures on the underside of seemingly smooth conver­sations, and I wanted to explore them through fiction. But over time, my focus gradually shifted toward those very brief moments where communication occurs, even amid imperfection. I consider myself a fundamentally pessimistic yet ordinary person, and I still feel daunted when faced with phrases like “the possibility of solidarity with others” and “communal ideals,” as if I’m standing in blinding sunlight. But the more time I spend as a writer, the more I believe in the value of these things, and I think I write fiction from within that belief.  I fully relate to that feeling of being daunted, like being blinded by sunlight. I also noticed a shift in your writing style. We associate the name Sou Linne Baik with neat, beautiful sentences. But if your early writing was defined by a keen expression of the fissures of everyday life and clear, sharp writing, the sentences in your more recent work seem to showcase a deepening of your signature tenderness and warmth. I imagine this stems from an inclusive attitude that seeks to embrace pain rather than merely observe it. Could you tell us about your process of writing and refining your sentences?  As I mentioned earlier, because I was always acutely aware of the imperfections of language from early on, writing came paired with a constant sense of discomfort. As a writer, language is all I have—a tool that I must use to express myself even though I don’t really trust it. At some point, though, I came to accept that discomfort as a condi­tion of the work and wrote anyway. Since language has so many limitations and the words I write can never reach others exactly as I intended, I began to think that I had no choice but to convey certain sensations by creating them through language, much like a painting or a piece of music. As a result, lending rhythm and breath to my sentences became more important to me, and my sentences have grown longer than they were in the beginning.   So there was an internal shift—a realization that you had no choice but to create and convey sensations using language. Since we can’t give up on language even though we know nothing can be fully conveyed through it, perhaps writing fiction is an attempt to keep approaching that impossibility. When I consider how the distinct rhythm and breath in your sentences were created in an effort to convey deeper sensations while embracing language’s limitations, I feel a sense of endearment and a desire to reread your work more carefully and cherish it that much more. What exactly does it mean to give rhythm or breath to a sentence? You seem to be pointing to a quality of liveliness beyond mere precision or polish, so I’d love to hear more about what holds your attention longest when you’re crafting your sentences. I’m so happy and grateful that you feel the desire to reread my work and look at it more closely. I once did a book talk with a writer whose style was the complete opposite of mine, and something they said left a strong impression on me. They believed the most important element of a story was the narrative, and that each sentence owed strict service to that narrative—which was why they strove to write precise sentences and avoided embellishment. I think about precision a little differently, though. I tend to believe that even if I stripped each sentence down to a subject and a verb, I still wouldn’t be able to express one hundred percent of what I really wanted to say. Because of that, when I’m revising, I go over my work repeatedly, focusing not only on whether the sentences sufficiently convey the narrative but also on whether the rhythm, the breath, and the modifiers are used appropriately to shape emotions and imagery. If I decide that it’s necessary to create a melody or rhythm even at the risk of compromising readability, I may deliberately string more and more words together to form long, complex sentences, and sometimes I’ll even replace a three-syllable modifier with a two-syllable one of similar meaning.  In your novella To Love and Be Loved, the grandmother appears to the protagonist as a figure who fills the void left by her mother. Through this narrative of three generations of women—“Grandma,” “Mom,” and “me”—this work speaks to another kind of possibility for women, an unknowable, infinite possibility of “woman” that can be retold and rewritten, not as a story of contradiction and negation but as a history that can be shared and understood. I personally feel that this novella serves as a stepping stone that must be crossed on the way to your full-length novel Brilliant Regards. I think so, too. In many ways, I feel like To Love and Be Loved has come to mark an inflection point in my writing.  In your earlier works, the characters tended to linger before feelings of loss, lack, and incomprehension. In this novella, though, we can see the beginnings of a cautious desire, despite the incomprehension, to try reading others again. Perhaps that’s why it reads at times like an emotional or narrative passageway into the broader, deeper mourning and hospitality of Brilliant Regards. When you describe it as an “inflection point,” do you mean a specific moment of change? Could it be connected to a shift in the very way you see the world and others? Yes. When I was writing those earlier stories, I tended to portray characters who withdrew inward rather than turning their gaze outward—characters who tried to peer deeper into themselves. After all, my main focus has been on magnifying and depicting certain moments of dissonance, and that was meaningful to me in its own way. But in doing so, I think my characters often came across as somewhat static or passive. While I was preparing to write To Love and Be Loved, I became acutely aware for the first time that most of the characters in my stories are women. I thought a lot about how, even though I had put forward these narrators and characters to explore universal themes of communication and language, they might all be read differently with this “woman” modifier attached to them. So I wanted to try portraying different kinds of women—characters who didn’t simply stand by and watch moments of failure unfold but who, after witnessing those moments, attempted to do something. Those are the kinds of characters who began to appear in my work.  Your short story “Brown Sugar Candy” also features a significant grandmother figure. The story is structured so that we see the narrator—an adult who had witnessed her grandmother Nansil acting as a caregiver during her own childhood—reconstruct the last years of her grandmother’s life using diaries kept while the family was living in France. The narrator’s portrayal of her grandmother is fascinating, and the fact that this is a story of a presumed past that no one can ever fully verify ironically evokes a very human tenderness. Please tell us about how this story came to you and how you finished it.  This story grew out of the themes I had explored while writing another story, “Heavy Snow,” which also appears in Summer Villa, and To Love and Be Loved. Around that time, I was deeply interested in how mothers are depicted in narratives, and I often found myself wanting to create “Mom” and “Grandma” characters who didn’t sacrifice as other mothers did—or, more precisely, who were perceived as not having sacrificed as much as was expected of them. By the standards of Korean society, Nansil in “Brown Sugar Candy” might be considered an atypical grandmother. I wanted to write about the granddaughter of a woman like that, a granddaughter who only belatedly comes to understand her grandmother’s life. I remember listening to many of the piano pieces that Nansil would have played while I was writing the story.  When the narrator demands to see what her grandmother is clutching in her hand, she says, “This is mine.” You depict the grandmother as a woman with a strong and frank sense of desire. You are obviously very far from old age. Still, is there something that might make you say right now, No, this is mine, like that grandmother? Anything you’re holding tight and can’t give to anyone else? Oh, that’s a tough question. For me, wouldn’t that be writing fiction?  The narrative structure of “Brown Sugar Candy” weaves together multiple storylines, similarly to how Haemi secretly reads Aunt Seonja’s diary in Brilliant Regards, and both works feature women’s love stories that are heartrending and moving. I want to ask you about the unpredictable clues, secrets that must be uncovered, and scattered truths that organize your stories. Do these formal elements, so expressive of the vulnerability that lurks in every corner of our lives, connect in any way to your authorial concern about entertaining the reader? I don’t think I’ve ever consciously thought about the entertainment factor while writing. Which is why, after Brilliant Regards was published, I was quite surprised to hear from readers that they had become so immersed in the story that they found themselves trying to guess what would happen next. The reason I structured both works around characters imagining other people’s lives through diaries was because this felt like a metaphor for how I write fiction. I’m always cautious about writing as if I know everything. We strive to understand others, but in reality, we’re often just imagining and interpreting what we’ve learned about them based on what we know about ourselves. For me, fiction is the outcome of that process, which is why my characters seem to repeat those attempts, searching for clues and making guesses over and over again.  Besides “Brown Sugar Candy,” you have written many stories set abroad. I can think of “Midday in Summer” and “Night at the Border” from The Wretched Light, “The Trajectory of Time” and “Summer Villa” from Summer Villa, and the novel Brilliant Regards. I’d like to think these settings contribute to making the worlds within your works that much more captivating. Is there anything you pay special attention to when foreground­ing landscapes outside of Korea? I don’t think there’s much that I pay more or special attention to. In the same way that specific, real-life place names are mentioned in stories set in Korea, I simply describe the settings abroad with the hope that readers who know those places well will find my renditions natural. Beyond that, I suppose I just try not to reinforce the typical images or preconceptions associated with a particular country or city.   Your vigilance about avoiding the typical images superimposed on certain places seems to manifest as a distinctive narrative texture—one that resists the mere consumption of foreign landscapes. After all, the foreign settings in your work function not merely as backdrops for the story but as sophisticated devices that create a certain sense of distance or a particular sensibility that drives us to view the characters’ emo­tions and relationships in a new way.  I’m glad to hear that it comes across as distinct from “mere consumption.” If I choose to set a story outside of Korea, it has to be for narrative reasons—not because I want readers to romanticize and consume exotic locales.   If you could introduce one more story alongside “Brown Sugar Candy” to international readers encountering your work for the first time, which would you choose and why?  It’s so hard to choose just one. I think I’ll go with “Radiant Days.” It’s a relatively recent work as well. While “Brown Sugar Candy” consists of a granddaughter’s imaginings as she tries to piece together her grandmother’s life, “Radiant Days” features a grandmother herself as the protagonist, so I think it might be interesting to compare the two side by side. Besides, Nansil from “Brown Sugar Candy” and Okmi from “Radiant Days” are very different grandmothers. I’d like to show readers the lives of two women who are too dissimilar to be grouped under the same umbrella of “Grandma.”   You also work as a translator, and I imagine that feels worlds apart from having your own works translated. Do you have any memorable anecdotes about how you felt when your work was translated for the first time or when you met international readers through those translations? And if any of your works are currently slated for publication in translation, I would love to hear about that. While not many of my works have been translated yet, I remember feeling fascinated and extremely curious about how my novels were translated when I saw them made available in a language I couldn’t read. Because I am also a translator, I know that when translating literary works, there are inevitably omissions that the translator makes and elements that the translator works to retain. In the case of my own stories, I’m always curious what the translator decided to take out and what they chose to keep in.   As a side note, I remember when I asked a student who had submitted an assignment for my fiction writing class to deliver an author’s note—a bit of com­mentary including anything they wanted to say to their classmates before the group critique—this student immediately blurted out, “I wrote my story in the vein of Sou Linne Baik.” I didn’t understand what they meant right away and asked for clarification, and the student explained that they had written a work of literary fiction that didn’t draw on the conventions of genre fiction. The fact that your name was the first thing they mentioned must mean that they really admire your work. I remember smiling a little because I found it so adorable. I understand that you also teach creative writing at a university. Is there anything you make sure to stress to your students when they set foot in your classroom?  I’m so curious about your student’s story. The thing I stress the most to students in my own classes is to write their sentences with sincerity. Many students often seem to forget that fiction is a narrative genre conveyed through language. Other than that, I guess I tell them to leave some room in their stories for things they can’t control?   Between writing, translating, and teaching, you must have a very full schedule. Writing is no easy feat either physically or mentally. Do you have any personal methods for conserving energy and getting back on track when you feel worn out or exhausted in your daily life? I don’t think there’s a special method. I just try to carve out as much time for myself as possible—time to simply be myself, unrelated to work. Not responding to messages immediately is also a way that I conserve my energy. I tend to check my emails and messages only when I’m in a position to respond, and while others might find it inconvenient or frustrating, to me, that feels like one of the small practices I can put in place to ensure that I remain in charge of my own life.  In a world overrun with “things to see,” what is the narrative power—the energy or driving force, if you will—that fiction can and must possess to capture readers’ attention?  I think that paying attention to the unseeable is an important role that fiction plays in this era where there is so much to see. Fiction involves lingering long and delving deep into the unseeable. This may feel tedious and slow to people who are growing accustomed to increasingly shorter forms of content, but I think that, paradoxically, this is precisely why the power of fiction remains valid today.   Finally, please tell us about your forthcoming novel, the one that will follow your collection Everything About Spring Nights.  I’m currently in the middle of writing it. I’ve been struggling for months because I can’t quite figure out the ending, so I’m not sure I’ll ever finish it. While Brilliant Regards was a story about Korean women in Germany, the novel I’m writing at the moment features many foreigners who have come to Korea. I am curious myself about how I’ll tie up the loose ends and whether it will ever be published, but I hope I can finish the manuscript and greet readers with a new book in the not-so-distant future.   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: Sou Linne Baik, Falling in Paul (Munhakdongne, 2014) 백수린, 『폴링 인 폴』 (문학동네,  2014) Sou Linne Baik, “Radiant Days” and “When the Light Reaches” in Everything About Spring Nights (Moonji, 2025) 백수린, 「아주 환한 날들」, 「빛이 다가올 때」, 『봄밤의 모든 것』 (문학과지성사, 2025) Sou Linne Baik, “Brown Sugar Candy,” “Heavy Snow,” “The Trajectory of Time,” and “Summer Villa” in Summer Villa (Munhakdongne, 2020) 백수린, 「흑설탕 캔디」, 「폭설」, 「시간의 궤」, 「여름의 빌라」, 『여름의 빌라』 (문학동네, 2020)  Sou Linne Baik, To Love and Be Loved (Hyundae Munhak, 2019) 백수린, 『친애하고, 친애하는』 (현대문학, 2019)  Sou Linne Baik, Brilliant Regards (Munhakdongne, 2023) 백수린, 『눈부신 안부』 (문학동네, 2023)  Sou Linne Baik, “Midday in Summer” and “Night at the Border” in The Wretched Light (Changbi, 2016)백수린, 「여름의 정오」, 「국경의 밤」, 『참담한 빛』 (창비, 2016) 

by Yeom Seung-suk

Interviews

Cutting Across the Blank Page to You

“White Space,” the very first poem in your first poetry collection, When Your Sadness Gets in the Way, has these two lines: “I want just one book, / nothing written inside.” And “Backlit World,” from your third collection, What I Learned on the Summer Hill, says, “I picked up thrown-out pages and made a book / Because when I think even one person might be living / there / I can’t give up a single sheet.” Isn’t the feeling of wanting to read and save others similar to the feeling one has when confronting a blank page? Let me start this interview with a confession: I am so happy I get to experience the verse-world of a strong, determined poet like you in real time. Since you started publishing, you’ve written four volumes of poems and four books of essays. How has the time in between been for you? When I published my first collection, the critic Kim Su-yi wrote in her accompanying essay about “the pain of someone who day by day has to live through . . . the darkest of worlds, where the world’s extinction and being’s decline are in progress at the same time.” I’ve thought about that sentence a long time, because I think it pinpoints my poetry’s spot on the coordinate plane really well. I’m interested in what’s fundamental, essential. When I write poems, I often picture the expressions people make when they’re alone, and I try to be quick to notice the signs of breakdown happening silently, formlessly inside us. I’ve kept working at making that inner turmoil visible, those scenes of existential solitude—like when I write, “Covered in flour, I stepped in the street / Hoping to make sadness seen” (“Disturbance”). The task is to emboss that invisible sadness inside us, so that people can see it.  In that sense, you might even call the time I’ve spent on these eight books a “time-out facing the wall.” My desk actually does face a wall. I’ve tried placing my desk by a window, but I found it difficult to withdraw into myself because I kept getting distracted by what was outside. The most important thing of all is whether a poem just stops at the linguistic surface, or whether the language osmotes across. Because I believe that when I really use my immersion and concentration, a blank page stops being a blank page, and can turn into a field so snowy your feet get lost in it.  I think writing poems like that is why readers also sink so deeply into them. The deer that appears in “Implication” has been by the speaker’s side for a long time without that speaker noticing. But “when the foot of the deer in the trap is rotting black,” the speaker “trips on the threshold [she’s] crossed countless times.” When I read your poetry, the points that connect us to one another seem to be sadness and pain. Human beings are inevitably bound up with each other. This is a difficult question, but: What is this desire, this attitude of standing by each other all the same, of being curious about others’ well-being when they’re out of sight? And what can we do for each other in this violent world? Many people find that my poems value connection and care. In “Implication,” too, the speaking “I” and the “deer” turn out to be more deeply connected than first expected. In fact, I ended up writing “Implication” because the scene appeared in a dream and it was so vivid. The two beings are different species, and even their sense of space and time is different, but as the poem unfolds, it turns out that, unbeknownst to them, they’ve shared many scenes, intruded in each other’s lives. The scene where the speaker’s anxiety unwittingly gets transferred to the deer, which changes its color, is one example.  I think all the lives on earth are interconnected, and I consider it important to recognize what that implies and to meet our responsibilities. You asked what we can do in such a violent world. I want to pay attention to the tenderest, most fragile parts within all beings. We carry tender and strong sides in us at the same time, but I think the parts we believe are strong may actually be imaginary armor we crafted so as not to get hurt. Human beings are fundamentally weak, and I believe we must not lose that weakness. The moment human beings refuse to get hurt, they turn scary. They grow numb to the pain of others. And in the end, they fall into the twin challenges of numbness and lethargy. Instead of decrying tenderness and fragility as weakness, ripping them up, hurting them, we should view them as windows allowing us to respond to each other’s feelings. In a world as violent as this, there’s probably no way to stand up against the violence that grows more furious by the day. About this problem, I’m always pessimistic. But there’s probably a reason sentences like these keep getting written inside me: “When I look, there’s a being looking at me”; “Saving one person means saving the two people overlapping in them.” I want to keep heading toward raising consciousness of our interconnection. Linking through fragility. That’s also the inner meaning of what I consider care.  When I read your poem “Walking the Carrot Field,” I imagine the speaker all alone on abundant land. It seems like her days were very busy before harvesting the carrots. But now that all the carrots are gone, she seems to have even more to do. I want to ask a quick, silly question. How big is your field? Can we still call a field with no carrots a carrot field? When I published my first book of poems, I was so focused on depicting the topography of sorrow that I didn’t even think about moving my body. Do you know Botticelli’s map of Dante’s Inferno? If you look at it, it’s so finely detailed it leaves you speechless—and depending on how you look at it, it may even be horrifying. When I published my first poetry collection, I think I was dreaming of that degree of density and precision. But my attitude toward poetry is different now. I started moving my body, walking the “summer hill,” the “carrot field.” I started wanting to depict a bird’s-eye view more than a miniature. The point was not to sit in one spot with my head bloating, but instead collide head-on with the world.  The phrases I’ve used as my books’ titles—“Summer Hill,” “Carrot Field”—are all dioramas of mine. You know, like those exhibits of tiny models when you go to a museum, and when you press a button a particular part lights up: they’re spaces that are part of an enormous world, and at the same time, worlds unto themselves. I wanted to just keep walking on and on through those spaces to discover this world’s hidden truths and meanings. The reason I chose walking, not riding something, is that walking’s the single act I love most in this world, and it’s also the directest, densest way to make body and world meet. The carrot field I was imagining was actually pretty enormous, tens of thousands of pyeong. And the demand the speaker faces in “Walking the Carrot Field” is to submit to her fate and the principles of nature. In the process, she experiences harvesting’s joys and losses. The important fact is that no vegetable can grow without a field’s soil being there. You asked whether you can still call a field without carrots a carrot field. Of course. A carrot field is full of memories of the soil, water, and wind that have been helping the carrots grow, and contains like a prophecy the lives and loves of carrots to come. You can’t say those aren’t carrots. Because a carrot is the sum of everything that is connected to the carrot. And I’m always curious about “news beyond my power to see” (“White Space”). If the essence of a carrot field is “the carrot,” it’s still a carrot field even without any carrots in sight. Because I believe that “absence” isn’t “not being there,” but rather a “state of existing in not-being-there.”  I think it’s so necessary for us to hear what you’re saying about what’s still left in a carrotless carrot field—those of us living life, tending our own fields. It somehow feels like a big comfort. I’m also curious what your next diorama will be. And hearing you talk so fondly about walking, I have to ask you about travel, too. They say all travelers leave to come back. But when I read your poems, for some reason I think of someone who always “has decided to stay,” both in places they’ve left and also places where they’ve arrived. And they go from carrying a secret in their pocket (like the person who has returned carrying a “deep-sea fish swimming in [their] pocket” in “Gooseberry, Gooseberry”) to living life out of longing. Since you travel a lot in your own life, I’d like to know how different or similar it feels when you arrive somewhere as opposed to leaving it. Your question makes me wonder about the reasons behind travel, what it means. I suppose my answer is that I love both the moment I leave and the moment I arrive a lot, so much that if you put them on a scale, it wouldn’t tip. I recently published a collection of travel writing I’ve done over the past twenty years, The Moment I Picked It Up. I’ve visited so many countries and cities, taken too many planes to count, but I’ve never gotten tired of traveling. Even now, I have three round-trip tickets. In light of all that, I wonder if I just like leaving for its own sake? On a trip, I love the feeling of “flowing” that takes over, the sense of not being stagnant. The travel scenes I’ve recorded are as vivid to me as if they were yesterday, and it feels like I’m putting my younger self in each of those cities and pictures one by one, then going back to them. I’ve potted part of myself, like a plant. Sometimes, I close my eyes and imagine going there, patting little me. I read something in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost that I liked so much I slapped my knee. It was her explanation of the two faces of loss. She says that when we lose a person or thing, we feel like something the size of that object has been cut out from our world. A sense of loss wells up to fill that hole, but the size of the world that constitutes one’s self remains the same. But what about when we lose our way? She points out that for a moment, the world that makes up our selves swells in size. And the world starts roiling with the possibilities of anticipation and the unknown. So what should I do then? Should I sit down and cry because I’m lost? Should I head down an alley? Travel’s like a state of rediscovering myself by losing myself. Maybe I keep leaving over and over because I like that rhythm. So that I can wake up again and feel the anticipation, the love, the failure at the heart of a journey.  Hearing your answer, reminds me of something you say in your nonfiction book When I Like You, When the Night Deepens: “I want to be the best person at wandering.” Isn’t the feeling of reading poetry like that? To get deliberately lost, to try our best to wander, we read poetry, I think. This issue of KLN features ten of your poems, including some from your latest collection, and I’m curious why you chose these for your first meeting with readers outside of Korea. I picked two from my first book, When Your Sadness Gets in the Way; four from my fourth, Walking the Carrot Field; and four new poems, which aren’t in a book yet—so ten in all. I went back to my very first book after all this time because I want to show readers the very first page of my poetry. “White Space” is the first poem of my first book. I wanted to give form to white paper—not as a flat, one-dimensional sheet, but a blank space expanding into the third and fourth dimensions. That was my point of departure, and I’m still circling around there, experiencing the forces of attraction and repulsion at the same time. It’s essentially my poetry’s rotational axis. And then I followed my old poems up with more recent poems I haven’t published in book form yet, but which are going into the next one.  You tack an interesting footnote on your poem “Toward Saneum”: Saneum is the “name of the place where my parents first met. It no longer exists.” It occurred to me that you’re feeling around for the time before you existed, the time before the white page. And I thought of some lines from “My Mustard Seed,” too: “Name I’ll one day raise again / Gourd to bottle my final gaze / I’ve come back to the start once again.” Please, tell me in more detail about what kind of meaning “the start” holds, and about going back to that start again. Thank you for picking out my latest interests with such clear eyes. I wrote “Toward Saneum” and the poem that follows it, “In-Ear,” as a sequence, and I’m actually planning the next poem right now. I wrote in the footnote that “it no longer exists,” but Saneum is the name of a real place. And it’s true that it’s where my parents first met. So you can say Saneum’s a place that’s there, yet isn’t there. Insofar as you can’t go back to that time in the past, it’s a place that doesn’t exist. But insofar as it preserves some form that even time’s tyranny can’t destroy or damage, the place obviously does exist. In my most recent poems, I’ve been thinking about place a lot. And I think that, independent of physical scale, anywhere my gaze and feelings linger can be a “place.” The moment you name a single flowerpot on a windowsill “my garden,” it takes on the role of a garden acres wide. Because the important thing’s not its size, but its nature.  I often wonder what it means for poetry to advance or improve. I can’t answer that easily, but I don’t think I write poetry kitted out with new experiments. I just want to quietly write poetry where I become aware of myself. Searching for eternity and permanence within mutability. Moving toward my body’s midline, my very core—to me, that’s another name for “advancement.” As always, my gaze turns inward, not outward.  That phrase, “a place that’s there, yet isn’t there” is interesting. It seems to touch upon the work of transforming public space into a personal place. Place is constituted around the “me” who experiences it. Like how you need a “me” in order to say “my garden.” Could you say more about the process of space becoming place, and then getting folded into your poetic world? As you point out, space and place are different concepts, and I think the most important vector in the transformation of space into place is me, which is to say my existing. And I’m continuously recording the world as it opens and closes on my account.  They say at the Seoul Meteorological Observatory there’s a special tree called the Season Observation Tree. Seasons naturally flow without boundaries, and out of curiosity I looked up how you measure and distinguish the change between seasons meteorologically. They told me the arbiter’s the Season Observation Tree. Even if cherry blossoms are blooming all over the country, if the tree designated as the Season Observation Tree doesn’t bloom, then that year’s flowering period for cherries doesn’t get recorded. Poems are like that, too. Only after passing through the gaze and attitude of the person that is “me” can the poem’s flowering period begin. I’m always dreaming up processes for drawing the extremely universal toward the most particular, and the unique height you reach as a result.  Just as how the Season Observation Tree feels the seasons’ flow, the reader also flows with your poems; they face their inner sadness with honesty, and experience being reborn as someone who willingly enfolded with someone else’s sadness. By becoming a person who stands by, who listens, they become strong and resolute. And they also realize “the fact that all of time is a vestige” (“Rabbit Hole”). Can you share what feelings you’ve kept constant through all these years writing poetry, and what has changed? “You can’t find causality for everything in life. This world is full of incomprehensibility, and perhaps writing poetry is the work of loving that incomprehensibility.” These are the things I’ve learned by trial and error by writing poetry long enough. Whenever I feel like I’ve had enough and want to settle, poetry thwacks me awake like a bamboo rod. It tells me I can go further, find more. Maybe it’s because I like traveling so much, but I find this double journey enjoyable so far: traveling in reality by train or boat, and on the blank page in verse at the same exact time. I hope I keep traveling this way for a long time. If you’ve seen a certain solidity and resoluteness in my poems, that’s probably just the footpath my heart wants to take, shaping sentences with the honesty of my two feet. Even if my “thoughts on poetry” never stop changing, I hope I can always preserve my “love of poetry.”  An Heeyeon, this interview with you was so short, but also such a valuable chance to hear your thoughts about both poetry and life. I hope this serves as a decent quick introduction for your newest readers, and that we can follow along with you on your next journey. Thank you so much!   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: An Heeyeon, “White Space,” in When Your Sadness Gets in the Way (Changbi, 2015) 안희연, 「백색 공간」, 『너의 슬픔이 끼어들 때』 (창비, 2015) An Heeyeon, “Backlit World,” “Disturbance,” and “Implication,” in What I Learned on the Summer Hill (Changbi, 2020) 안희연, 「역광의 세계」, 「소동」, 「연루」, 『여름 언덕에서 배운 것』 (창비, 2020) An Heeyeon, When I Like You, When the Night Deepens (Nanda, 2023) 안희연, 『당신이 좋아지면, 밤이 깊어지면』 (난다, 2023) An Heeyeon, “Walking the Carrot Field,” “Gooseberry, Gooseberry,” and “Rabbit Hole,” in Walking the Carrot Field (Munhakdongne, 2024) 안희연, 「당근밭 걷기」, 「구스베리 구스베리 익어가네」, 「토끼굴」, 『당근밭 걷기』 (문학동네, 2024) An Heeyeon, The Moment I Picked It Up (Nanda, 2025) 안희연, 『줍는 순간』 (난다, 2025) An Heeyeon, “My Mustard Seed,” in Within What We Call Night (Hyundae Munhak, 2019) 안희연, 「나의 겨자씨」, 『밤이라고 부르는 것들 속에는』 (현대문학, 2019) An Heeyeon, “Toward Saneum,” Haksan Munhak 130 (Haksan Munhak, 2025) 안희연, 「산음으로」, 『학산문학』 130호 (학산문학사, 2025) An Heeyeon, “In-Ear,” Contemporary Literature 853 (Hyundae Munhak, 2026) 안희연, 「인이어」, 『현대문학』 853호 (현대문학, 2026) 

by Yeojin Han

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