I’ve been following Korean literature in translation now for around 25 years. Back in the day, I’d buy everything I could lay my hands on – after all, there wasn’t much of it around, so there wasn’t much financial commitment involved. At the time, most of the literature available was originally written more than thirty years previously. Things have changed in recent years with the increasing openness of Western publishers to translated fiction, and the growing popularity of genre fiction, with thrillers, sci-fi, YA and healing fiction dominating the lists of titles published in English, often within a year of publication in Korea.
Increasingly though, through lack of shelf space and, I’m sorry to say, a lack of enthusiasm about much of the new content, I’ve been consuming many recent translations via e-book or audiobook.
But there are some new titles which deserve to be bought in hard copy. Preferably, that would be in paperback. But in the most extreme circumstances, when the paperback version is not yet available and it’s a title that demands your attention, you have to bite the bullet and go for hardback. A very recent example of this was Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, currently sitting by my side, though for one reason or another I’m only five pages into it so far.
But today I had a close read of a Korea Society event announcement that was sitting in my email inbox and practically fell off my chair: I discover that today is the publication date of a collection of Lee Chang-dong stories and novellas from the 1980s and early 90s entitled Snowy Day and other stories. Lee of course is known in the west for his superb movies, and I was aware that in his earlier career he was known for his work in the theatre as writer and director; but I had not read the KOFIC book on him in enough detail to register his early short stories, including the collection There’s a lot of shit in Nokcheon (녹천에는 똥이 많다 1992). Stories from that early collection and more make it into this new Penguin collection translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl and Yoosup Chang.
It’s a nice and encouraging surprise that a major house such as Penguin should consider publishing translations of short stories written over 30 years ago (though of course they published their wide-ranging Korean anthology a couple of years ago). And continuing what we hope could be a trend, we’ve got the Penguin collection of Oh Jung-hee short stories coming later this year (tr Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton).
I’ve just ordered Snowy Day from my local bookstore and it might just nudge the Han Kang off my reading pile.
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If I’m honest, there’s little in the K-Fiction that’s coming out in English that I’m really that interested in at the moment (apart from Han Kang), of course, so it would be nice if someone sent me a copy of this (which they won’t!). I was namechecked in a Dalkey Archive newsletter last week for having reviewed 21 of the 26 Library of Korean Literature, but that all seems a long time ago – can’t really remember the last Korean book I read (apart from a reread of ‘Greek Lessons’…).
I think we’re on the same page 😉