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More buzz about Please Look After Mom / Mother

Please Look After Mom
Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-sook
  • Please Look After Mom seems to be the latest hot translation. Amazon are already telling me I would like it. http://bit.ly/gPTvD3 #
Please look after Mom (the US edition)Please look after Mother (the UK edition)

I know which edition I’d buy

  • Guess which translated Korean novel will be BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime in early June. You only get one guess. @KTLit #
  • The unstoppable Shin Kyung-sook bestseller has sensibly been renamed for the UK market: “Please Look After Mother.” http://amzn.to/e08M41 #
    • suzyinseoul: cover art is better, too!
    • KTLit: The Knopf marketing team has basically missed nothing on this one…
  • The FT is first of the UK broadsheets to do a review of Please Look After Mother, “the million copy bestseller”. There will be a lot more #
  • RT @KTLit: Brilliant take-down of NPR’s poor review of “Please Look After Mom” by Kokkiri at “subject object verb” blog: http://bit.ly/g3Ehxp
  • @KTLit So – is “Please look after Mom” as good as the press it’s getting? #
    • KTLit: @lklinks lt is good for its genre… tear jerking. It would not be my first choice, but if you like Amy Tan, Park Wan-so.. you’ll like it..

4 thoughts on “More buzz about Please Look After Mom / Mother

  1. The covers are interesting. I actually tried find covers of various translations, not just the English ones – because I think there is more than just words in the title that worth noting here. Choice of images too. A lot of stereotyping, particularly once you look at the cover(s) of the Korean original (both the book ones and the one of the musical based on the book).

    Scroll down to the image gallery: http://alualuna.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/please-look-after-mother/

    1. Yes! I’m in translation studies, so I was interested in other translations to start with and I have been at conferences/lectures where people have given interesting papers on these kind of things.

      In fact, it’ll be interesting to keep track of translations into other languages that are still being prepared and see what kind of covers they come up with… I find it fascinating they all like to push the ‘young, East Asian beauty’, when there is no such character in the book – with the focus being on the mother, and neither of her daughters really fitting that image that the covers are providing. And the parasol on the French edition… says a lot about the commercialisation of the book market, and how often covers/titles/etc. have little to do with what’s inside a book.

  2. I look forward to some updates then!

    Have you met Marzena Stefanska? She’s based in the UK and currently working on the translation of Shin Kyung-sook’s I’ll be right there, which will be worth waiting for. But I’m most looking forward to the translation of Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower which should be coming out later this year (I can’t remember the translator, but I think it might be the same as the one who did Your Republic is Calling You and PLAM).

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