Preface
This is the first number of Volume Four of Korean Literature Today and we feel compelled to express once again our gratitude to the agencies supporting this project: The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Korean P.E.N., the Korea Foundation. We are acutely aware of the size of the task facing us in preparing each issue, and we have been very much encouraged by a series of messages from almost every 'corner' of the world expressing gratitude and interest. We must also express our own profound admiration for the many talented translators whose work we publish. Some are already well-established, but we hope more and more to be able to publish translations by new-comers, the people who will form the next generation of expert literary translators from Korean into English.
Our concern is that through this journal, major works of Korean literature in reliable translations should be made available to people who would otherwise have no access to them. Our hope is, of course, that major international publishers will eventually decide that there is a public for Korean literature. Until now very few works of Korean literature have been published by major publishing houses because they are bound by considerations of commercial viability. This review will only serve its purpose if the people reading it share the works they admire with others who would not normally see it; we would like to be able to send the review to many individuals as well as to institutions, but that is not possible. Therefore an on-line version is being prepared, which would certainly make its contents more readily available.
This issue contains, as usual, both poetry and fiction, by such a variety of writers and from such a range of decades within the century that it is very hard to make any general statements. Probably most readers would agree that almost all the writers chosen represent the 'pure literature' tradition rather than the 'socially involved'. Yet it is hardly possible to depict people in stories set in the present without at least some indication of a social context and of social conditions, and a story will always contain some kind of social message, implicit if not explicit.
In poetry, Yun Dong-ju is still immensely popular in Korea, as much for his life history and heroic death as for the small number of poems which survived. Kim Gwang-rim is one of Korea's senior living poets, an imagist like so many; yet it would be hard to read his work without discerning a powerful plea for human values in a corrupt, too materialistic society. Pak Seong-yeong's poems are mostly evoked by details of the natural world, but always there is an awareness of the contrast between the innocence of Nature and the destructive forces active in so much of human activity. Yu Ky¢§ong-hwan is in some ways the most Wordsworthian of all; he stresses nature and the innocent vision of childhood, yet he has spent his entire career in journalism and cannot be thought to be unawre of the great social questions confronting modern Korea, so that their absence from his poems is in itself a message. Jo Jeong-kwon pursues an essentially spiritual quest in poems that suggest the spiritual bankruptcy of modern society, while the poems of Lee Seong-bok resist every kind of too easy reading, esthetic or social.
In this issue, we are fortunate in having important works by several major writers. Seo gi-won's work is deeply rooted in the confusion of Korean society in the wake of Independence and the Korean War. He portrays in vivid terms the appalling destruction of the time, the sufferings experienced by women in particular. Choi In-ho began his literary career in 1972 with a best-seller, which is usually seen as a sign of compromised values; yet he is widely recognized as a writer of particular artistic integrity and talent, as well as of popular appeal. His short story "The Drunkard" is especially admired for its exploration of the 'search for lost father' motif.
It is tempting to speculate on what might have emerged if Yi Eoryeong had pursued the literary career he began by writing several experimental novellas in the 1960s. Given his great gifts, it can only be a matter for regret that destiny took him in other directions. He perceived, long before other Korean writers, that contemporary fiction plays creatively with a diversity of voices and often depends on covert or open reference to other literary works in forms of 'intertextuality' and experimented accordingly in his few works of fiction.
Lee Mun-yeol is too well-known to need introduction. His work too is usually categorized as 'pure literature' yet a few years ago, in a paper for the World P.E.N. Congress, he insisted strongly that the distinction often made between 'pure' and 'socially committed' writing was a false one and that all true literature necessarily worked in both dimensions. It is a pleasure to be able to publish one of the stories from his cycle of short storiesYou Can't Go Home Again in this issue.
Lee Sun-w¢§on is a name that may be less familiar; he has only been publishing for ten years and has covered many topics, both social and more personal, in his short stories. Critics have praised the architectonic quality of his work, as well as his skill in telling a good story grippingly.
This issue also contains another installment of Hwang Sun-w¢§on's classic novel Trees on a Slope, first published in 1960 and still one of the great works of modern Korean fiction.
Dae-dong Lee
Brother Anthony