Two voices from colonial Korea

Korea in the 1920s and 1930s was a colony of Japan. Korean writers of that period worked under censorship, in a language their rulers were trying to push aside, and many of them died young. Two of the most distinctive voices of those years belong to writers whose names differ by a single syllable: Yi Sang, the restless modernist of Seoul, and Yi Sang-hwa, the poet from Daegu whose question about spring became one of the best-known lines in Korean literature.

Both are staples of Korean school anthologies, yet English readers rarely get to meet them. Pagera has just published new, readable English translations of five of their works: two prose pieces by Yi Sang and three poems by Yi Sang-hwa. All five are free to read now.

Yi Sang: a writer who staged his own ending

Yi Sang (1910-1937) was the pen name of Kim Hae-gyeong, a trained architect who became the most radical experimenter in Korean letters. His poems played with numbers and diagrams; his stories talk to the reader, mock themselves, and refuse to sit still. In late 1936 he went to Tokyo, where he was detained by the police and fell gravely ill with tuberculosis. He died there in April 1937, at twenty-six.

Record of My Life-Ending (종생기, 1937) appeared in the magazine Jogwang in May 1937, weeks after his death. The narrator is a writer named Yi Sang who has decided to make his own death a masterpiece. He rehearses epigrams, scolds Tolstoy for ruining a fine deathbed with a clumsy last word, gets a haircut, picks up a walking stick, and sets out to meet a young woman named Jeonghui on the third of March. She sees through every pose. The story is ornate, funny and painful at once, a man writing his own epitaph and then refusing to stop talking.

The story is full of wordplay that depends on Chinese characters and Korean sounds. The translation keeps the characters in the few places where the joke needs them. The best example is a pun on isang (以上), the word that closes a formal document, meaning "that is all," and which sounds exactly like the author's name. Each time it appears, the English reader sees both the meaning and the sound.

Read Record of My Life-Ending

Ennui (권태) is an essay Yi Sang wrote in Tokyo in December 1936, looking back on a summer in a remote village in Pyeongan Province. It ran in the Chosun Ilbo in May 1937, after his death. Nothing happens, and that is the point. The heat does not break, the dogs have forgotten how to bark, the village children have no toys and invent a game out of nothing. The landscape itself seems to bore him:

To the east, Mount Palbong. Why is its curve so monotonous, so utterly without rise or fall?

By nightfall the joke has turned into something closer to dread. It is one of the strangest and most modern essays of its time, and it reads well in English.

Read Ennui

Yi Sang-hwa: from the bedchamber to the stolen fields

Yi Sang-hwa (1901-1943) was born in Daegu. He first became known through Baekjo (White Tide), a small literary magazine of the early 1920s, and later turned from romantic poetry toward the realities of colonial rule. He worked as a teacher and journalist and died in 1943.

To My Bedchamber (나의 침실로, 1923) appeared in the third and final issue of Baekjo. Across one night before dawn, the speaker calls again and again to his "Madonna," begging her to come to the room he has made ready before the night is over. Desire, fear and death run together in long, breathless lines. The translation keeps that incantatory rhythm, including the repeated call that opens each stanza.

Read To My Bedchamber

Does Spring Come, Even to Stolen Fields? (빼앗긴 들에도 봄은 오는가, 1926) is the poem most Koreans can quote. Published in the magazine Gaebyeok, it follows a man walking into the spring fields, drunk on sunlight and green barley, talking to the sky and the wind as he goes. The joy is real, and so is the question hanging over it, because the land he loves now belongs to someone else. One of its lighter moments:

and the skylark, like a girl beyond the fence, laughs her welcome from behind the clouds.

The poem opens with its famous question and closes with an answer. It is worth reading all the way through to see how he gets from one to the other.

Read Does Spring Come, Even to Stolen Fields?

The Most Grievous Prayer (가장 비통한 기욕) is a short lament in two stanzas. The first follows Koreans driven off their land toward Jiandao and the plains of Liaodong in Manchuria, clutching their starving lives. The second turns to those who stayed behind in Seoul and the countryside, living on in drunken despair. Both stanzas end with the same bitter prayer to the god who made mankind. It takes a minute to read and stays with you much longer.

Read The Most Grievous Prayer

Read them side by side with the Korean

Each of these translations can be read in bilingual mode, with the Korean original and the English translation set next to each other paragraph by paragraph, or line by line for the poems. If you are learning Korean, this is an easy way into texts that are usually hard to approach alone. Tap a Korean word and a dictionary entry with an English gloss appears.

These are short works. Ennui and each of the poems can be read in a single sitting, and Record of My Life-Ending in an evening. They are a good first step into Korean modern literature, and a reminder of how much of it is still waiting to be read in English.