From the publisher’s website: Translucency puts together about fifty poems by Chankyung Sung that showcase his dexterous command of metaphor and subtle sensibility toward language. In these poems, Sung portrays a complex world of man’s spirit with refined language, opening a new horizon of intellectual poetry, or “metaphysical lyrics,” in Korea. It is not the … [Read More]
Booklist: Korean literature in translation (page 39)
The Long Road
The Long Road is a moving, elegiac short novel that examines the processes that caused idealistic young Koreans to depart for overseas during the 1990s in the wake of their experiences under Korea’s darker days of military dictatorship in the 1980s. The story centres on a trio of men: Han-Yeong, who although initially attracted to … [Read More]
Until Peonies Bloom: the complete poems of Kim Yeong-nang
Kim Yeong-nang (1903–1950) is highly reputed in Korea for the delicate lyricism of his poems. Yet in many ways he has remained little known, even in Korea, limited to a small number of often anthologized poems. Although he was a resolute opponent of Japanese colonial rule, he did not suffer frequent imprisonment, or death, so … [Read More]
Far-Off Saint: poems of Cho O-hyun
From the publisher’s website: Cho O-hyun, a Buddhist monk and poet, was born in 1932. He became a Buddhist monk in 1958, and started his literacy career in 1966. He has become one of the prominent figures in the literary world and has been awarded several prestigious prizes in Korea. Currently, he is the director … [Read More]
Songs for Tomorrow: A Collection of Poems 1960-2002
From the publisher’s website: In this long awaited full survey of the poetic writing of Korea’s leading literary spokesperson, the translators have gathered poems from 42 years, representing numerous of the author’s 135 books. As they note in their introduction, “Ko Un is…like a force of nature.” Born in 1933 in southwestern Korea, he grew … [Read More]
Contradictions
Yang Gui-ja is one of Korea’s major literary figures of the last generation, with a succession of literary prizes and best-sellers to her credit. Her most representative early work, the 1987 Wonmi-dong saramdeul, is available in English as A Distant and Beautiful Place. In the 1990s her writing took an increasingly personal turn with a … [Read More]
Day-Shine
From the publisher’s website: Powerfully inventive poems of love in contemporary life by Chong Hyon-jong, one of the most respected poets writing in Korea. The novelty of his poetic language with its narrative lyricism and provacative philosophy makes it impossible to classify Chong’s poetry, and yet it is a holder of tradition which embodies the … [Read More]
Sending the Ship Out to the Stars
From the publisher’s website: Park Je-chun is a major poet in Korea today. His works are marked by a poetic imagination and a sensibility which draw largely on Korean Buddhist and Taoist traditions, as well as Korean classical literature. Though he is widely read in the Oriental classics and Western poetry, Park’s emotions, imagery, and … [Read More]
Back to Heaven: Selected Poems of Ch’on Sang Pyong
From the publisher’s website: These poems by “the happiest man in the world” are full of light though written in dark times. Ch’ōn had the art of seeing the beauty of life beyond all the pain, and of putting it into the music of words. Recently, many young Koreans have discovered in these poems and … [Read More]
A Moment’s Grace: Stories from Korea in Transition
A Moment’s Grace presents short stories that depict the core of Korea’s modernization, from Liberation in 1945 to the Seoul Olympics in 1988. The stories here provide a view of the process through the eyes of ordinary people as they were affected by the historical and social forces that formed modern Korea. A separate background … [Read More]
Walking on the Washing Line
From the publisher’s website: Kim Seung-Hee’s poetry is usually described in Korea as “feminist,” “subversive,” and “surrealist.” Most important is the way her poetic voices differ radically from any other Korean poet’s, male or female. Her work has sometimes found a readier acceptance among readers of the English translations than among Koreans reading the originals, … [Read More]
Questioning Minds
Available for the first time in English, the ten short stories by modern Korean women collected here touch in one way or another on issues related to gender and kinship politics. All of the protagonists are women who face personal crises or defining moments in their lives as gender-marked beings in a Confucian, patriarchal Korean … [Read More]
Prayer: Poems of Kim Je-hyun
From the publisher’s website: Kim Jehyun, a sijo poet, was born in 1939 in the city of Jangheung in Korea’s Southern Cholla Province. After graduating from Hongik University, he has devoted himself to poetry with an emphasis in the sijo. He first received notice at Chosun Ilbo’s 1960 Spring Literary Contest. Kim’s first collection of … [Read More]
Lost Souls: Stories
Publisher description: These captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the … [Read More]
From Wonso Pond
A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English, From Wonso Pond transforms the love triangle between three protagonists into a revealing portrait of the living conditions that led to modern Korea, both North and South. In a plot … [Read More]
The Red Room
Publisher description: Modern Korean fiction is to a large extent a literature of witness to the historic upheavals of twentieth-century Korea. Often inspired by their own experiences, contemporary writers continue to show us how individual Koreans have been traumatized by wartime violence—whether the uprooting of whole families from the ancestral home, life on the road … [Read More]