By contrast to the glacial pace of T’oji, I’m six pages in to Yi Cheong-jun’s Seopyeonje (http://t.co/Z32AGY0p | US: http://t.co/tjQBtaAD) and already I’m crying. [Read More]
Category: Translated Korean literature (page 20)
I’m one volume in to T’oji, and nothing’s happened yet
Why Park Kyung-ni’s epic novel “Land” is like the long-running BBC radio soap opera “The Archers”. And why someone should create a Reader’s Digest version. [Read More]
How to put Korean literature on the map: Charles Montgomery
Charles Montgomery gives his suggestions for Literature Translation Institute Korea for the next 10 Years. Well worth a read. [Read More]
Heinz Insu Fenkl interview
The New Yorker talks to Heinz Insu Fenkl, translator of Yi Mun-yol’s short story An Anonymous Island nyr.kr/n1i5eR [Read More]
Korea Times on the globalisation of Korean Literature
The Korea Times speculates as to the possibility of an upcoming deluge of Korean Literature in English: the next hallyu? bit.ly/quWU92. Fingers crossed. [Read More]
A Yi Mun-yol short story in the New Yorker
A Yi Mun-yol short story (An Anonymous Island) is published in The New Yorker — a first! wp.me/p1mFzB-cJ. Via @subjobjverb. Translation is by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Update: LKL article on the short story and Im Kwon-taek’s screen adaptation of it (Village in the Mist – 안개 마을, 1983) can be found here. [Read More]
RIP Richard Rutt
RIP Richard Rutt (27 August 1925 – 27 July 2011), Roman Catholic priest, former Anglican bishop, sometime RASKB president, and pioneer in Korean studies. Tributes by Brother Anthony in the Korea Times and William Pore at H-net, with partial bibliography. [Read More]
Interview with Brother Anthony
Great interview with Brother Anthony of Taizé at Asymptote http://bit.ly/ossoht # [Read More]
Margaret Drabble reviews Park Kyung-ni’s Land
Margaret Drabble reviews Park Kyung-ni’s Land in the Times Literary Supplement: “a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet” http://bit.ly/iQ7SBn # [Read More]
Shin Kyung-sook’s book roadshow comes to Europe
The Shin Kyung-sook roadshow arrives on mainland Europe. Please Look After Mother is already in its third print run in Spain. http://bit.ly/m7WUBL # [Read More]
Please Look After Mother serialised on BBC Book at Bedtime
Those who haven’t got around to reading Shin Kyung-sook’s massively successful Please Look After Mother yet (not that you have any excuse – it’s a very easy and quick read in Kim Chi-young’s translation) can now digest it in very easy chunks before going to bed. It has been abridged and serialised for radio, and … [Read More]
“A major addition to world literature” – a report from the launch of the translation of Park Kyung-ni’s T’oji
Monday night at the KCC was part celebration, part education: the launch of an English translation of a major portion of one of Korea’s best-loved modern epics: Park Kyung-ni’s Land. The evening was fronted by the translation’s publisher, Global Oriental (now part of the 300 year old Brill publishing house), but the three speakers were … [Read More]
The outside toilet in Park Wan-suh’s childhood memories – part 2
The second of two extracts from the early pages of Park Wan-suh’s Who ate up all the shinga? dealing with the memories of her childhood existence in the countryside near Kaesong in the 1930s and early 1940s, posted to coincide with the Korean garden at the Chelsea Flower Show this coming week, which features an … [Read More]
The outside toilet in Park Wan-suh’s childhood memories – part 1
To coincide with the Korean garden at the Chelsea Flower Show this coming week, which features an outside toilet, here’s the first of two extracts from Park Wan-suh’s Who ate up all the shinga? The outhouse, it seems, was much more than a place for moving the bowels. Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 and … [Read More]
Book review: Shin Kyung-sook — Please look after Mother
Kyung-sook Shin: Please look after Mother Originally published in Korean as 엄마를 부탁해, 2008 Translated by Chi-Young Kim Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2011, 272pp Can we ever really appreciate who we have in our lives until they are gone? Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after Mother looks through the eyes of a family united in trying to … [Read More]
A celebration of the launch of Park Kyung-ni’s Land in translation
In the mid-90s Kegan Paul published what was billed as Part 1 of Park Kyung-ni’s epic novel, Land (Toji). Translated by Agnita Tennant (Née Hong), the volume extended to 657 pages. In fact, this was only half of Part 1. Global Oriental is now publishing all of it, in three volumes totalling 1,172 pages. There’s … [Read More]















