Interviews

Believing in Possibilities Despite Everything

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

by Shin Yeonsun

Interviews

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

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

by Ko Myeong-jae

Interviews

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

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

by Kim Mijung

Interviews

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

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

by An Heeyeon

Interviews

Mediating Lyricism and Historicity: Han Kang’s Translators

As Han Kang’s translators, what do you think is the significance of this Nobel Prize win?  Kyungran Choi Compared to the Nobel Prizes in Literature awarded in previous years, the reaction from French readers to Han Kang’s win has been quite enthusiastic. Even before the Nobel announcement, Impossibles Adieux (We Do Not Part) had already sold more than 13,000 copies and had garnered a lot of attention here, but I heard that immediately following Han’s win, the 8,000 copies available in print were sold out. French media reported on the news, and there were several consecutive days of coverage in the daily newspaper Le Monde from October 10 through 12. The national radio station France Culture invited me and Pierre Bisiou as the translators of Impossibles Adieux on the air for an hourlong conversation about Korean literature and translation. Looking back at the international attention that Korean literature began to receive after Han Kang won the Booker Prize in 2016, it seemed inevitable that a Nobel Prize in Literature would someday follow. The fact that Han Kang was named the winner—as a translator, a literary citizen, and a reader, it was hard to hide my joy.  Paige Aniyah Morris This seems like a moment of long-awaited recognition for Korean literature. It’s a shame that for so long, despite such a rich literary history, literature from Korea hadn’t received much international attention. I hope that this win will revitalize the Korean literary translation and publishing industries and encourage overseas publishers to break away from the popular trends and acquire more diverse Korean literary works.  Mariko Saito In 2024, a year of never-ending war and genocide, shouldn’t the fact that there is a writer who hasn’t forgotten those who’ve suffered and died unjust deaths be a source of hope in itself? Through movements such as the Gwangju and Jeju uprisings, Han Kang shows us how human dignity endures even in times of crisis. I think it’s especially meaningful that this message has expanded beyond the national bounds of Korea and entered into the realm of the human experience.  Was there a particular means by which you came to translate Han Kang’s work? Sunme Yoon In 2011, as I was searching for new works to translate, I came across an article about famous young Korean authors, which prompted me to start reading the first book I ever read by Han Kang, La vegetariana. Before I’d even read the whole first chapter, I decided to translate the book, and the following year my translation La vegetariana was published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, becoming the first translation of that novel into a Western language. This was how I came to translate Actos humanos (Human Acts), Blanco (The White Book), La clase de griego (Greek Lessons), and Imposible decir adiós (We Do Not Part) as well. Ok-kyoung Park I met Han Kang on a literary tour organized by LTI Korea in 2013.1 I loved the books that we all read and discussed while traveling around Gwangju and Damyang so much that I knew I had to translate them. When I was asked by the Swedish publisher Natur & Kultur to translate Han’s work, I naturally agreed to take on the task.  Could you share what the international reaction has been like to Han Kang’s works in translation? SY It’s no exaggeration to say that international readers were the first to discover Han Kang’s true worth. Argentine readers responded very enthusiastically to La vegetariana. In 2013, with the support of LTI Korea, Han participated in the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and I heard there wasn’t an empty seat in that lecture hall—tons of people who’d read the novel came prepared with lots of questions. And, of course, three years later, The Vegetarian won the International Booker Prize. OP Both Den vita boken (The White Book) and Jag tar inte farväl (We Do Not Part) have received lots of attention and acclaim since being published, with positive reviews appearing in more than ten renowned newspapers and magazines, including Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. More than a thousand readers attended the book talks Han Kang held in Stockholm and Umeå in 2024, and the events were so successful that there was a more than hour-long wait to receive the author’s autograph afterwards.  If you had to briefly explain why international readers should read Han Kang, what would you say? OP Not only does Han’s work deal with universal issues that anyone, regardless of nationality, can relate to; it delves into violence, conflict, societal oppression, trauma, and more while still offering readers a sense of warmth and an emotional resonance rooted in its distinctly lyrical and beautiful style.  SY These days, many overseas interviewers have been asking me to recommend the books that make for a good introduction to Han’s work, and I always suggest starting with La vegetariana or Actos humanos. No matter how prominent Korean society and Korean history are as the backdrops, I think that all of Han’s works evoke universal empathy because they are all ultimately reflections on being human. PAM If you are a reader who wants to be completely transformed by a book, I recommend reading the works of Han Kang. We Do Not Part especially is an excellent novel for increasing readers’ awareness about Korean society, history, and intergenerational trauma.  What do you usually pay the most attention to when translating Korean literature into your target language? Furthermore, what did you concentrate the most on when translating Han Kang? PAM I try to bring out the emotions of the source text in my translations, and I value not only the accuracy of the translation but the writing style, the rhythm, the lyricism. When translating this Han Kang work in particular, I remember creating a glossary for translating “snow,” “crystals,” “spirits”—words that formed the distinctive universe and language of We Do Not Part. I was happiest when I read passages from e. yaewon’s and my English translation and felt as moved as I did when I’d read them in the source.  OP I’m the type to try not to leave out a single word of the source in the translation. At the same time, because it’s important to me that it doesn’t read like a translation to Swedish readers, I think I have to strike a good balance. When I was deciding on the title for Jag tar inte farväl (We Do Not Part), I thought hard about choosing a Swedish word that could convey the feeling of the Korean word jakbyeol, or “farewell.” And because Swedish sentences must have a subject unlike Korean ones, I decided after a discussion with the author to add Jag, meaning I, to the title of the Swedish translation.  SM When it comes to Han Kang, there is always “poetry” at the center of her prose. It is important to translate in such a way that you don’t crush the margins that harbor that poetry. The historicity is also key. In the case of Wakare wo tsugenai (We Do Not Part), I referenced Okinawan, a language with a similar history to the Jeju language. At the same time, instead of completely translating the Jeju language into Okinawan, I felt that I needed to create a new language just for this novel.  Please describe the process of publishing Han Kang’s work in translation. What kinds of support did you receive, and did you face any difficulties in signing the publishing contracts? Could you share any tips for successfully publishing a translated work of Korean literature? SY For La vegetariana, Actos humanos, and Blanco, I received support from LTI Korea, and for La clase de griego and Imposible decir adiós, I received support from the Daesan Cultural Foundation. Of these works, La vegetariana was one that I chose myself and translated. If this is your first time trying to publish a translation, I advise you to write a publication proposal introducing the author and the work and to send that proposal to publishers who might be interested. Rather than analyzing the book in your proposal, it’s helpful to summarize its content, highlight its strengths, anticipate its prospects and the response from readers in the target market, and include a sample translation. In other words, the translator also has to play the part of an agent.  OP In my case, I was approached by the publisher to translate Han’s work, so I didn’t encounter any particular difficulties. For more than ten years now, renowned Swedish publishers have been interested not only in midcareer Korean authors but in emerging writers as well. In the late 1990s, when Korean literary translation was in its infancy, there was a sense of reluctance from publishers regarding translated literature even when translators submitted full manuscripts, but now, publishers often ask for summaries of works by Korean writers or, as is true in the case of Han Kang, they buy the rights first and then commission the translations. From a translator’s perspective, this is an encouraging development. PAM Thanks to support from LTI Korea and the fact that Han’s previous translators into English had already developed good working relationships with the publishers in the US and the UK, I think the publication process for We Do Not Part went much more smoothly than I’d expected. It was definitely quite a difference from the dead ends and high barriers to entry that I’ve faced in some of my other translation and publishing experiences. For emerging translators who want to translate the works of Korean writers who are not yet well known in the target region, I highly recommend seeking support from organizations such as LTI Korea and the Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea.  LTI Korea is engaged in many projects, such as our translation and publication grant programs, meant to promote Korean literature overseas. What are your hopes going forward? OP I have a long history with LTI Korea—from Yi Munyol’s Ett Ungdomsporträtt (A Portrait of Youthful Days) in 1999 all the way through to 2017, I’ve translated a total of six books with LTI’s support. I’ve also participated in the residency program twice and had great experiences meeting several writers over the years. I hope that there will be steady support for publishing translations in Sweden going forward. I would also love to see mid-career translators have the opportunity to participate in the residency. The experience of discussing literature with the authors and meeting various writers through the literary tour is such a huge asset for a translator.  SY My relationship with LTI Korea is a very special one. Not only have I received several translation grants from LTI, but I’ve been teaching literary translation at the Translation Academy for the past fourteen years. Through teaching, I think I’ve come to reflect more deeply on my own translations and have become a better, more refined translator as a result. The Sample Translation Grant Program was done away with a year ago, but I hope that this program, which reflects the discernment and literary knowledge of translators, can be revived even if it is reduced in scale. I think that if translators are able to take the lead in selecting works to translate and liaising with publishers, more diverse writers and literary works can be introduced around the world.  [1]  Editor’s note: This literary tour was conducted as part of LTI Korea’s Residency Program for Translation Research in Korean Literature, which invited translators to join a writer in exploring the region where the writer’s works are set in order to broaden translators’ understandings of these works. In 2013, Han Kang took part in the tour with translators from seven languages: German, Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, Vietnamese, Italian, and Chinese.  Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris  Kyungran Choi lives and works in Paris as a translator and employee at the Korean Cultural Center in France. With Pierre Bisiou, she is the co-translator of Impossibles Adieux (We Do Not Part). Paige Aniyah Morris is a writer, translator, and educator from New Jersey, USA, who now lives in Seoul. With e. yaewon, she is the co- translator of Han Kang’s We Do Not Part into English. Ok-kyoung Park graduated from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, received her master’s degree in Sweden, and now works as a translator. Since the late 1990s, She and Anders Karlsson, a professor at the University of London, have co-translated many works of Korean literature into Swedish. Of Han Kang’s works, they have translated Den vita boken (The White Book) and Jag tar inte farväl (We Do Not Part). Saito Mariko is a translator from Niigata, Japan, who now lives in Tokyo. She has translated Han Kang’s Girishago no jikan (Greek Lessons), Subete no, shiroi mono-tachi no (The White Book), Kaifuku suru ningen (Fire Salamander), Wakare wo tsugenai (We Do Not Part), and with Kim Hun-a, Hikidashi ni yuugata o shimatte oita (I Put the Evening in the Drawer) into Japanese. Sunme Yoon is an instructor in the Spanish language track at LTI Korea’s Translation Academy and a translator into Spanish. She has translated many of Han Kang’s works as well as Chung Serang’s La única en la tierra (The Only Hana on Earth), Won-Pyung Sohn’s Almendra (Almond), Cheon Un-young’s El hombre del Desván (The Catcher in the Loft), and Yun Ko-eun’s La turista (The Disaster Tourist). 

by KLN Editorial Team

Interviews

Parallel Worlds, Not Knowing, and the Art of Gaping

Bo-mi, I’ve long admired your work, both as a reader and translator. Your ability to create such singular stories has always astonished me, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to talk more in-depth with you. Your work often features parallel worlds and alternate realities. In your debut collection Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, a son dies in the opening story, “Blanket,” but survives and reappears in the last story. The young couple in “Blanket” become the protagonists in a story from a different collection. You’ve said that you “never forget that even characters who appear briefly have their own lives” and you’d like readers to approach your fiction as if they’re reading about real people. What draws you to parallel worlds and alternate realities? When I look back, I realize I was a child deeply fascinated by events. Not just what happens in the visible world, but the hidden one I couldn’t see with my eyes. In elementary school, I read a lot of books about the supernatural. I pestered my mom to buy them for me. One book—I don’t remember the title now—was about the mysteries of the world. It was probably a translation, and it covered subjects like the whereabouts of the last Russian princess Anastasia, the Hollow Earth theory, and the secrets behind Agatha Christie’s disappearance. The last chapter was about witches. It claimed that witches still existed today and included photos of their rituals. I was ten years old at the time. I knew those photos were probably staged, but part of me thought, or maybe hoped, they were real, taken by someone who had infiltrated their secret world. To me, everything in that book was both real and fake, and this created a sense of confusion, which was probably intentional. Within that confusion, the world of the book seemed more plausible.      Later on, when I became a writer, I often thought about the emotions that book stirred in me, and I wished my readers would experience my stories in the same way. I wanted them to believe my characters existed somewhere out there or, at the very least, to hope my characters were real. To achieve this, every character had to have their own life. Everyone lives their own story. The person who passed by me today, even if I don’t know them, is the main character of their life. Maintaining that sense—that even characters who appear briefly have their own lives—has always been crucial to me. It helped me discover the joy in writing. In the afterword to Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, you say that you like to insert recurring characters in parallel worlds because you “enjoy imagining [yourself] living in an alternate universe, working hard and trying [your] best.” This, in turn, makes you “relieved, because [you’re] allowed to be a little lazy here.” I find this concept fascinating because it’s not just about creating alternate lives for your characters, but about seeing another version of yourself in a different reality. How does this idea influence your writing process? Does it help you connect more deeply with your characters? And how do you decide which characters to insert in these parallel worlds?  For a long time, I didn’t realize this way of thinking influenced my work. It was more a way of comforting myself rather than something that affected my writing. However, this has changed recently as I began incorporating my life into my work. Of course, my personal life makes up less than ten percent of my writing, but even that’s quite significant for me. I used to think it would be difficult to include my experiences. I felt they were too ordinary and not worth using as material. And the more special experiences seemed too difficult to adapt because they were things I’d actually gone through.      Recently, I began to see my experiences as part of what another version of me in a different universe might go through. The me living here might share small seeds of the same experiences with the me in another universe, but that me in the other universe would make different choices and treat people differently. This idea really intrigued me. For example, in my short story collection Dreams of Love, which was published last year, a place called Jungwoo Mansions comes up a lot. That was the name of the apartment I lived in as a child. The characters in the collection are different people, but they all share a common link—they’re versions of me from various universes, representing my different childhood selves. These days, the character I connect with the most is myself.  You’re gifted at building intricate worlds in a small amount of space. I’m thinking of your enigmatic piece, “The Cat Thief,” which was published in Freeman’s in 2022 and later in Lit Hub. It’s stunning how you’re able to suggest entire histories of characters in just a thousand words. How do you achieve this? I’m so glad you liked my story, “The Cat Thief”! I wrote that piece before I made my debut. Back then, I felt like I could never become a writer and was often engulfed in a sense of despair. I couldn’t write anything. The thought of writing a book was overwhelming. My confidant, who became my husband, was aware of my struggles and suggested that I try writing a story in the style of Project Runway. It’s an American reality competition show where designers create outfits within a set time and theme, and then their work is judged. I remember my husband saying, “If you don’t write anything, you’re out.” We decided on the subject (cats) and the length (two thousand characters). And we said we had two hours to finish it. We sat in a cafe and began writing. I took my actual experience—the time a man stole a tea timer for me—and added different details to it. I remember feeling a bit desperate, knowing I had only two hours to write. But this taught me that anything is possible in fiction. Before, I used to worry a lot, wondering, “Could this really happen? Isn’t this too farfetched?” But I decided to toss aside those doubts and gained the courage to set stories in foreign places and to write about ridiculous events, like stealing a cat.       My struggles with writing didn’t vanish after completing this piece, but I learned something crucial about the mindset needed to write a book. The next work I wrote became the title story of my first collection, Bringing Them the Lindy Hop. And Emerson from “The Cat Thief” appeared again in my first novel, Dear Ralph Lauren. In the afterword to Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, you also mention that a seasoned writer criticized the second piece you ever wrote, saying it lacked authenticity. Though you were upset, you had an inkling of what he meant—that you were perhaps too free in writing about things you didn’t know. Similarly, when your story “Blanket” won the Dong-A Ilbo New Writer’s Contest, one of the judges questioned whether you’d done your research. You then noted that writing without meticulous attention or prior research could be fatal. How do you balance research with giving yourself the freedom to write about anything and everything? When do you decide that you’ve done enough research and it’s time to write? And how has this approach evolved throughout your career?  Writing freely about things I don’t know and the sense of freedom I felt while writing “The Cat Thief” are slightly different. I used to write about subjects I wasn’t familiar with. In “Blanket,” the issue was with the protagonist’s rank in the police department. I was unaware of how police promotions worked and was told that a promotion like his would never happen. I realized that such misinformation could ruin the plausibility of the entire piece, undermining its sense of reality. After that, I made sure to thoroughly research the subjects I wrote about. Once, I wrote a novel set in France and spent a lot of time on Google Maps and hotel websites to accurately depict the streets, the city, and the hotels. Later, readers asked if I’d ever been to Lyon, and I was thrilled when they were surprised to hear I hadn’t.      However, the freedom I felt while writing “The Cat Thief” is a bit different. It has less to do with objective facts and more to do with my mindset while writing. Objective facts need to be accurate and shouldn’t be compromised. But beyond that, I believe you should be able to write anything. Characters can go anywhere, meet anyone, and do anything, no matter how extreme. This is different from knowing something well. My story “Dreams of Love” is about a woman who tries to abandon her child. If I had a child or truly understood a mother’s feelings, I think it would have been harder to write that story. It’s important to hold on to that sense of not knowing. In his essay “On Writing,” Raymond Carver said that “writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block.” Although my interpretation might differ from his original intent, I feel that preserving a sense of “not knowing” is also a crucial quality for writing fiction. You count Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever among your influences, which makes sense, given your realistic, minimalist style and your use of the “show, don’t tell” technique. However, I notice a Chekhovian quality in your work as well, especially in your exploration of psychological realism and subtext, combined with a kind of ironic humor that highlights the contradictions of the human experience. At times, your stories even verge on Kafkaesque. You’ve also shared that you’re influenced by various genres like mystery novels, American dramas, and science fiction. Do you consciously think of these techniques and influences as you write? How would you describe your own style or voice?  Chekhov and Kafka! My goodness! As a writer, how could one not love Chekhov and Kafka? Their influence is almost impossible to avoid. For a long time, whenever I was asked to name my favorite short stories, I’d cite Kafka’s “The Judgment,” Hemingway’s “The Battler,” and Choi In-ho’s “The Drunkard.” These three works are very different from one another, but they have one thing in common: they don’t tell you everything that happens to the characters. They include gaps or things we don’t understand. I was drawn to this style because it felt like a true representation of life. Life is full of things we can’t understand, and we’re bound to fail when we try to explain them. For instance, when a tragic event occurs, and some people die while others survive, how are we to make sense of it? This is one of the themes in my debut work, “Blanket.” If fiction is to reflect life, I believe it must capture this sense of not knowing. I wanted to capture the gaps themselves. Early on, I did this by intentionally leaving things unsaid, but now I find myself trying to reveal the unknowability—the gaps—while saying more. Is this why you’re drawn to the mystery genre, where gaps and unknowns often thrive?  I think so. Fundamentally, I believe every fictional work is a detective story. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but when readers dive into a story, they’re always curious about the choices the protagonist will make. It’s important to keep that sense of curiosity alive. Aside from this idea, I have an immense love for the mystery genre. As a child, I watched a lot of detective shows and read countless detective novels. I grew up on Agatha Christie and the Sherlock Holmes series. Later on, I became obsessed with writers like Raymond Chandler, William Irish, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald. I always wanted to write a mystery novel featuring a detective, so I was thrilled when I got the chance to write Children of the Lost Forest a few years ago. Another similarity to Chekhov I see in your writing is how you create deep pathos while keeping a certain distance from your characters, as if viewing them through a telescope, revealing more from afar. Yet, you manage to evoke strong emotions in readers. How do you maintain emotional distance while ensuring your characters still resonate deeply with your audience? I don’t know everything about my characters. When I think of a story or character, I try to write as if they’re real people in another world. As you mentioned, I imagine that I have a sort of telescope, observing their actions and simply recording what I see. Often, I don’t fully understand why they say or do certain things, which only deepens my interest. I find myself becoming more curious and I think about them even more. I really enjoy this feeling when I write. These feelings inspire me. “You can love without understanding.” I love this phrase. It captures how I feel when I write and how readers might feel when they enjoy my work. John L’Heureux said, “To avoid melodrama, aim for a restrained tone rather than an exaggerated one … keep the language deflated and rooted in action and sensory detail. Don’t reach for dramatic language but for what’s implied.” You do this particularly well. How do you exercise such restraint and control in your writing, especially in emotionally charged scenes? What advice would you give to writers struggling with this issue? Some readers criticize me for not expressing enough emotion in my writing. Or they think I portray it in strange ways. They might even be bewildered after finishing a story, wondering what exactly happened to the characters. When I use restraint in my stories, it’s not intentional. It’s just that there are many parts I feel I can’t fully explain. For instance, if I’m writing a scene where a wife loses her husband and bursts into tears, I can clearly describe the situation of losing her husband, but I can’t fully explain why she’s crying. I can say it’s because she’s sad, but that might not be entirely true. It’s a very complex emotion. She could be feeling guilt, emptiness, self-pity, and so on. Instead of explaining everything, I choose to show the scene. I stay silent about the parts I can’t fully understand and focus on what I can describe well. I believe this approach can reveal much more. Of course, some may choose to explain the complexity with words, but that’s not my method. Themes of class disparity and the gap between the rich and poor, the privileged and disadvantaged, frequently appear in your work. I’m thinking about the young couple in “Blanket” who say that they’re “nothing,” calling themselves “human trash,” the blind man and his wife in “Downpour” who cite their “stupidity” as the reason why they can’t ever move up in the world and become happy, and also the nanny in “The Substitute Teacher.” What motivates you to explore these social issues and what message do you hope to convey? My novel Dear Ralph Lauren is where I seriously tackled this theme. The protagonist, Jongsu, is studying in the U.S., but he recalls a girl he knew in high school. At that time, the brand Ralph Lauren was extremely popular in Seoul, and almost everyone had at least one Ralph Lauren item. But this girl came from a less affluent family and had to work part-time to afford it. This novel is based on my own experience. Some of my high school friends could easily buy shirts that cost over 200,000 won, while others wore their school uniforms all the time. I was somewhere in the middle. If I’d begged my parents, they might have bought it for me, but never willingly. Those school days left a strong impression on me.       Back then, we didn’t openly distinguish between friends based on financial disparities. Everyone got along well on the surface. But there were subtle emotions at play, like the sense of alienation between wealthy friends and those who struggled financially. Since I was neither rich nor poor, I might have been more sensitive to these nuances. As an adult, I realized that this sense of alienation could manifest in various forms—anger, lament, resignation, self-deception, malicious intent, hypocrisy, hatred, contempt, and so on. I’ve always wanted to write about the impact of money and wealth on people’s hearts. Maybe not in a direct way, but these concerns are a constant presence in my work. Can you walk us through your creative process? How do you develop your story ideas, and what does a typical writing day look like for you? What inspires you and what do you do when you’re stuck? In the past three or four years, my writing pattern has changed. I used to start my workday late, but these days I try to start by 9:00 a.m. at the latest. It would be better if I could start even earlier, but that hasn’t happened yet. I find it difficult to work at home, so I have a list of cafes where I can be productive. Cafes are usually empty and quiet early in the morning. I enjoy writing in that kind of atmosphere. My goal is to write two to three thousand characters every day. Then I come home by 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. and completely forget about my work, spending my time on personal errands or hobbies. When I’m not writing, I prefer to separate myself completely from my work.      Honestly, I still don’t fully understand how the seeds of my books come to me. Sometimes certain scenes pop into my mind without any context. Recently, I had an image of a girl getting slapped on a snowy day. To make sure I don’t forget these ideas, I jot them down in the Notes app on my iPhone. Whenever I read an interesting article, see a compelling scene in a documentary, or come across a memorable passage in a book, I make note of it. When I start writing, I review these notes and use them to build my story.      This process doesn’t always go smoothly. While my goal is to write more than two thousand characters a day, there are many days when I can’t meet that target. Sometimes writing feels too overwhelming. Still, I go out early every morning and try to reach my word count, even if it means writing sentences that I might delete the next day. By repeatedly writing and deleting, there comes a day when I don’t delete them anymore. So, when I face a daunting pro-ject, I tell myself: if I keep pushing through this overwhelming feeling, I’ll be able to write something one day. As a professor at Kyung Hee University, how do you balance your teaching responsibilities with your writing career? What do you emphasize most to your students? The class I teach at Kyung Hee University isn’t specif-ically about fiction writing. It’s called “Reflection and Expression,” and it’s a required liberal arts course. Students write about themselves, and they must take it to graduate. Most aren’t interested in writing, and after the semester, they probably won’t write again. But what I emphasize is that even if they don’t write, they should continue the activities essential to writing. Like paying attention to themselves and the things around them, observing what happens. By doing so, they can discover things they’d previously overlooked and develop feelings about them. This idea actually comes from the Raymond Carver essay I quoted earlier. He wrote, “At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.” I believe this applies not just to writers. Anyone who views the world this way will have a richer life, and the more people who do, the better our world will be. I love that line. Raymond Carver talks about “gaping” or “paying attention” as being perhaps the most important quality of writing. It reminds me of the story “You Must Know Everything” by Isaac Babel and what the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said: “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” Do you have any specific exercises or techniques you use to cultivate this attentive way of seeing in your students? How do you personally ensure that you stay observant and engaged with the world around you? I encourage my students to make a list of things they like and don’t like. But I also tell them that discovering those things is difficult. To have genuine interests, you need to invest time. Simply saying, “Oh, I like this” or “I really hate this” isn’t genuine. We should focus on things that evoke “strange” feelings in us—emotions we can’t easily explain. When certain scenes or sentences stay with you, it’s worth questioning why that is. Why does this linger in my mind? I believe these kinds of questions help you discover who you are. They help you realize what kind of lens you use to see the world. Once you understand your “lens” better, you can either deepen that perspective or change it.      The important thing is not to wait for texts that move you to come along but to actively seek them out yourself. Read, watch, and listen, and if something stays with you, question it. This is what I call “reading.” The text can be anything. Ultimately, I believe your own life should become the subject of your reading. Everything you encounter can be something to read. You’ve received numerous literary awards throughout your career, including winning the Young Writer Award four years in a row from 2012 to 2015, as well as the prestigious Daesan Literary Award and most recently the Yi Sang Literary Award. While it’s not all about the awards, how has this recognition impacted you and your approach to storytelling? Winning awards is always a thrill. Of course, I’m grateful, and I often think I’ve just been lucky. Debuting as a writer, publishing several books, and receiving various awards. . . I try to see it all as luck. I try not to put too much stock in them. Maybe it’s because I’m easily swayed by such things. If I’m not careful, they might influence me too much! So, I put extra effort into thinking that they mean nothing. I always aim for balance. You know that famous saying by Isak Dinesen? “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” That’s what I strive to do. What books are on your nightstand right now? Are there any films or works of art that are currently inspiring you? I haven’t been able to read as much lately, but I’ve started a book called The Divided Self by Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing. Published in 1960, it’s a study on schizophrenia where Laing argues that instead of merely categorizing schizophrenic patients by their symptoms, we need to understand how they perceive the world. Only by approaching them in this way can we effectively treat them. This reminds me of what the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks advocated in Awakenings. He insisted that we need to listen to the stories of Parkinson’s patients. He said, “We must come down from our position as ‘objective observers,’ and meet our patients face-to-face; we must meet them in a sympathetic and imaginative encounter. . . they can tell us, but nobody else can.”      Of course, we can never fully understand how patients with schizophrenia or Parkinson’s disease perceive the world. Some aspects will forever remain beyond our grasp. Even so, we must never stop trying to look into their reality and listen to their stories. I believe this is a mindset a writer should have. There are gaps in this world that we cannot understand. We may never be able to explain them fully. Even so, we shouldn’t stop trying. As discussed earlier, we shouldn’t avert our eyes. That’s how I feel. I want to keep writing fiction that includes these gaps. Translated by Janet Hong      KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:• Son Bo-mi, “Bringing Them the Lindy Hop,” “Blanket,” and “Downpour” from Bringing Them the Lindy Hop (Munhakdongne, 2013)     손보미, 「그들에게 린디합을」, 「담요」, 「폭우」, 『그들에게 린디합을』 (문학동네, 2013)• Son Bo-mi, “Dreams of Love” from Dreams of Love (Munhakdongne, 2023)     손보미, 「사랑의 꿈」, 『사랑의 꿈』 (문학동네, 2023)• Son Bo-mi, “The Cat Thief” from The Fireflies of Manhattan (Maeum Sanchaek, 2019)     손보미, 「고양이 도둑」, 『맨해튼의 반딧불이』 (마음산책, 2019)• Son Bo-mi, Dear Ralph Lauren (Munhakdongne, 2017)     손보미, 『디어 랄프 로렌』 (문학동네, 2017)• Son Bo-mi, Children of the Lost Forest (Anon Books, 2022)     손보미, 『사라진 숲의 아이들』 (안온북스, 2022)• Son Bo-mi, “The Substitute Teacher” from Cats and the Elegant Night (Moonji Publishing, 2018)     손보미, 「임시교사」, 『우아한 밤과 고양이들』 (문학과지성사, 2018) Son Bo-mi began her literary career by winning the 21st Century Literature New Writer’s Prize in 2009 and the Dong-A Ilbo Literary Contest in 2011. Her works include the short story collections Bringing Them the Lindy Hop, Cats and the Elegant Night, Dreams of Love, and The Fireflies of Manhattan; the novella The God of Coincidence; the novels Dear Ralph Lauren, Little Village, and Children of the Lost Forest; and the essay collection Anyway, American TV Shows. She has received numerous awards, including the Munhakdongne Young Writer Award, the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, the Kim Jun-seong Literary Award, the Daesan Literary Award, the Yi Sang Literary Award, and the Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award. Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale. She’s a two-time winner of the Harvey Award for Best International Book for her translations of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass and Yeong-shin Ma’s Moms. She is currently a mentor for ALTA’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program.  

by Janet Hong