April’s literature event at the KCC looks at last year’s translation of selected works of Yi Sang. I personally find Yi pretty hard going, so I’m hoping this session will give me a way of looking at his work that will encourage me to give him another go.
Yi Sang: Selected Works
Wednesday 28th April 2021 7pm-8pm on Zoom
Entrance Free – Booking Essential
Apply to [email protected] with your name and contact details by 15th April.
Work discussed: Yi Sang: Selected Works, Translated by Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney, Sawako Nakayasu, Publisher: Wave Books, 2020.
Yi Sang: Selected Works
Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. His work shows innovative engagement with European modernism, especially that of Surrealism and Dada.
Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience. This collection of Yi Sang’s poetry, essays, and stories was crafted in English by translators Jack Jung, Sawako Nakayasu, Joyelle McSweeney, and Don Mee Choi.
Jack Jung
Jack Jung is a graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States. He received his BA in English from Harvard and MA in Korean language and literature from Seoul National University. He is the American Literary Translation Association’s 2021 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program Mentor for Korean poetry. He currently teaches Korean poetry translation at Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
Steven J Fowler
Steven J Fowler is a writer and artist who works in poetry, fiction, theatre, film, photography, visual art, sound art and performance. He is a lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University, teaches at Tate Modern, Poetry School and Photographer’s Gallery. He is the director of Writers’ Centre Kingston and the European Poetry Festival.
Links:
(automatically generated) You can find a video of this event on the KCC YouTube Channel, here.