easy korean essay

Key to Korean Motivation & Resources for Learning Korean

Learn how to write TOPIK essays well using Wongoji writing guidelines

The following are Wongoji basic writing guidelines that I found in a Nonsul (essay) notebook by PAPIER co, LTD. I’ve translated them into English to help you better understand how to properly write essays using Wongoji papers ( which is what the TOPIK test uses as well ).

Download Wongoji essay writing instructions PDF

The directions are included on the PDF print-out above, but here they are again for clarity:

Wongoji Basic Cryptography

By default, there aren’t any implicit principles for using wongoji . But usually using wongoji , there are some general forms to follow.

Essay wongoji were created to easily identify the fundamental elements of spelling, spacing, and so on. More than that, by dividing paragraphs, you can easily identify contents and see how much you’re writing. Therefore , certain forms will equip you with the ability to write descriptive paragraphs, so that when the grader first sees your writing, they’ll be left with a positive first impression.

In one box , write one character . Only for the alphabet (lowercase) and Arabian numbers should 2 characters be used in one box, but every sentence mark should also have its own box. (Uppercase alphabet characters also need their own box.)
For paragraphs , the first box should be left blank and you should start writing from the second box. This means it’s a new paragraph. Only do this for a new paragraph. (If there’s no empty box to leave a space between words in a line, don’t leave the next line’s first space blank. Rather, put a (V) mark after the last character and begin the next line with a consonant .)
Spacing and spelling rules should be followed, but when there’s a sentence mark that should usually be followed by a space like a comma (,) or period (.), generally don’t leave a blank.
Exclamation marks (!) or question marks (?) should be written in the center of the box, but quotation marks ( “ ” ) commas (,) and periods (.) should be written in the corner of the box nearest the letters they affect.
In the case that a sentence mark should be stamped at the end of a line, it shouldn’t be carried down to the next line, but rather placed inside the last box on that line. Starting a line with ‘.’ or ‘,’ should be carefully avoided.
When writing a dialogue , change to the next line for each full quotation mark ( “ ” ). The first box should be left blank and quotation marks should come in the second box.

FREE Practice Papers

Also, if you want, I’ve also created our own FREE 원고지 Practice Papers that you can use to practice.

Download Practice Wongoji PDF

Do you practice your topik essays with wongoji do you find this resources helpful.

120 Days to TOPIK #1 – Gather Resources

Gather your resources! This is one of my favorite parts of any new Challenge because it can be fun to look over the kinds of materials you WANT to use and the kinds of things you WANT to learn (plus, Continue reading 120 Days to TOPIK #1 – Gather Resources

How I Will Study for the TOPIK II in 120 Days (and You Can Join Me)

Well, that was unexpected. I recently wrote a post outlining my plan to cram for the TOPIK II in 30 days. I had been planning to take the test on July 19, 2015. But, I guess plans change. As it turns Continue reading How I Will Study for the TOPIK II in 120 Days (and You Can Join Me)

Thanks! Initially I thought a space had to be left AFTER every form of punctuation “.” “,” etc… but that makes almost two full blocks oven between the sentences so this makes sense. I was also never sure what that “V” was for at the end of the sentence.

Right. But Sarah has also said that you probably don’t need to write the “V” at the end in TOPIK. She said nobody usually writes the “V” even though it’s “conventional.”

Pingback: Take a Look at Some Sample TOPIK Answer Papers (Blank) and download Wongoji essay papers | Key to Korean
Pingback: 30-Day Challenge: Day #15 – Proper spacing (띄어쓰기) in Korean can Save a person’s life! | Key to Korean

What is counted as a 자 and what isn’t counted as a 자? I’m really confused by this because some sites said that spaces between words can be counted as a 자. How about the spacing before each paragraph/dialog/quotation? Is that counted as a 자 as well?

According to the TOPIK sample answers for essay, they said that if you exceed by 100 자 or do not meet the required amount of 자, they will minus 5 points. So if I exceed by 99 자, will I still get penalized for it?

Actually, EVERY box counts as a 자. “자” technically means “character” or “letter” and INCLUDES spaces.

For the most part on TOPIK, you WON’T be writing multiple paragraphs or quotations, so it isn’t something to really worry about during the test, but YES, the spacing before each should count as a 자 as well.

If you take a look at some sample TOPIK answer papers (in the back of the TOPIK Test Guide books, or located here on our website ), you can see that there are numbers going down the side of the page. This is to help with speedy counting of the number of 자 used. So long as you remain WITHIN the specified amount, you should be OK.

I’d also say, if you’re 99 in excess (and the penalty is 100), then you won’t be deducted. The numbers down the side of the paper make for simple counting and it will be easy to tell if you go “over” or not. They’ll just look down to see if you have 자 in the “forbidden area.”

But I say, Why even test it? For the most part, you’re not really going to be ABLE to write so long. It’s best to FOCUS your writing to your main points and work on cleaning up your essay WITHIN the guidelines. You won’t get bonus points for going long. But you WILL get better points for spending your extra time editing and fixing rather than over-writing.

Good luck in TOPIK!~

By the way, you know that from July, there is NO MORE Beginner Writing section , right? Only Intermediates and Advanced students need to worry about that.

Dear Aaron, thank you for your article. One question I have though is how we can edit the TOPIK writing essays. Is there an official way to insert corrections without being penalised?

You cannot edit TOPIK writing essays AFTER the test.

However, DURING the test, if you make an error, you need to use the white-out tape (available at the tests if you ask the test proctors – or just bring your own).

Last time, to try to avoid needing to use white-out tape, I tried to write the essay FIRST in pencil and then go back over it all in pen. However, this method took WAY too long and I didn’t have time to complete the full writing portion.

Therefore, I think it’s a much better idea to just do you best in pen and if you make a mistake, use the white-out tape.

Pingback: TOPIK Wongoji Writing Rules Revisited

The Only Guide You Need to Pass TOPIK Test

Best Self-Study Material to Prepare for TOPIK Test

TOPIK Essay Writing Guide – Evaluation and Marking Scheme

The readers of TOPIK GUIDE have frequently been writing to us for some guidance on the Essay part of TOPIK Writing (쓰기) section. So Here We are putting this detailed article about this.

Most of the questions in TOPIK are multiple choice and objective type where there is, clearly, only one correct answer. You don’t even need a human to check if the answers are right or wrong. Mostly OMR recognition softwares do the job. The problem is with the subjective type questions. In these questions there is no ‘one correct answer’. Different persons can give different answers and they all may be correct. Sometimes it is difficult to even say whether the answer is right or wrong because it may be partially right and partially wrong.

This type of questions generally appear in the Writing section of TOPIK. And believe me, you are not the only person who find them difficult. Evaluating this type of questions is the most difficult task for Examiners as well. As these questions are evaluated by real humanss and not the machines, there are high chances of variation in evaluation process depending upon the personality and psychological status of the examiner. And that”s why it confuses the test takers on what and how to write the answer of such questions so that it looks correct to the evaluator. Particularly, the TOPIK Essay writing part is the most difficult of these subjective questions.

Most of TOPIK test takers are confused at some point of time about what and how exactly they are expected to write in the essay. Do they want to check your grammar vocabulary, spelling etc? or Do they want to test your writing skills, like how beautifully and logically you put your thought, how great your thoughts are? or Do they want to see how beautiful your handwriting is? Will using difficult words and complex sentences get you more marks? There are many such questions that confuse the mind of test takes, specially when they appear for the first time. Many people find themselves in a very difficult situation when the topic of the essay is related to Korea. I know many people who thought writing anything wrong about Korea or Koreans will fetch them poor marks. 😉

In this series on TOPIK essay writing, we are going to clear all those doubts. We are going to tell you exactly how TOPIK essays are evaluated and marked. The series is based on ‘ model evaluation guideline ‘ from NIIED, the organization that conducts the TOPIK test.

We have divided the series in to 3 parts in which we will take 3 model essays each from beginner, intermediate and advanced levels of TOPIK and will analyse the evaluation system by giving detailed marking pattern of 3 model answer essays.

Below is the model guideline that all the evaluators have to follow, according to NIIED:-

We will start with the Beginner Level .

Here is the Essay Question that we will take as a model:-

I am leaving you with three example answer essay. read properly and think how you would mark them if you were the examiner. In the next post we will see how the TOPIK evaluators marked them.

TOPIK Beginner Model Essay 1

TOPIK Beginner Model Essay 2

Go to TOPIK Essay Writing Evaluation Analysis – Beginner Level

Dr. Satish Satyarthi

Satish is the Founder and CEO of TOPIK GUIDE. He is passionate about languages. He created TOPIK GUIDE website to help Korean language learners learn Korean effectively, succeed in TOPIK test and achieve their goals. He has a PhD in Korean language. His research area has been 'Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language (외국어로서의 한국어교육)'. He is a Seoul National University (GKS) alumni. He has been active in Korean language teaching and research for more than 10 years. We are a team of passionate researchers from Seoul National University specializing in Korean language and linguistics. We are committed to helping international students prepare for the TOPIK test. You can connect with us on Facebook , Twitter , Google+ or YouTube

Hello, thanks for this post.İ think first one is best, right Because second one has some mistakes and third one is not good How abkut this essay’s points. İ wonder bexause i will get this exam next year.그래서 열심히 공부 합니다. 정말 감서헙니다.

Thanks a lot for sharing this nice and informative post, This posts shows your efforts that how do you cover any topic research. I really like your blog because your blog has updated posts on different current issues. I would request you to keep sharing your thoughts. Essay Writing

이것은 너무 도와주신 글인데 감사합니다 선배님.

hello i hav a doubt.. see topik test are conducted 4times in evry 1year…and as for me i will be giving my test in the 40th topik…i have 3years…but i live in india and here the educational sessions end in june…so my point is that i wont be able to make it in the beginners level 1 test which is conducetd in january…should i wait for another year or shud i give level 1 topik in july???

This beginner essay writing will definitely be a great resource for the students who will write essay first time in their academic career. Essay writing is not so much tough, just need a little bit attention due to which students can write essays of excellent quality. Buy Essay

Thanks for this post, I speak spanish,and I dont found information about it. thanks

Great to know that it helped… Thank you.

Hello. Thank you for the great review and the whole site… it helps a lot 🙂 I am preparing for the intermediate level TOPIK, and I was just wondering if the 400-600 characters are counted with or without space?? Do you know anything about this? I was sure it’s without space (because that’s how usually it is at language tests), but then just to make sure, I put a sample essay from the official TOPIK paper and copied it to Word, to see how many characters it is. And it turned out that it’s 353 characters without space, and 456 with space… So I’m kind of confused now :/ Do they count it with space? It makes a huge difference actually….

Actually it’s with spaces…

Thank you so much for the quick reply ^^

Hi, I would like to know if you have to write the essay using the ㅂ니다 form. I have been learning Korean on my own and talking to my friends. We usually just use the polite speach ending in 요. But Since this is a test I guess I will have to use the other form right?

You can check this post:- https://www.topikguide.com/2012/07/which-form-of-language-to-use-in-topik-exam-formal-plain-or-informal.html

hi , i want to know if i can pass the level 2 of topik exam how can i use by this score, thank you for your answer

It can help you getting into a Korean university or getting a job in a Korean company… It also helps you get certain types of Visa…

Good morning teacher.nice to meet you in your team chart. am from Cambodian now i stay in Cambodian too . but i want to test Korea exam how can i do it because am so far from here. so u can advice me how to do? am looking for you reply me back .thank you so much. i want to study more in Korea but am so poor so i don’t have money to study at there. if you have a good advice for me please tell me …i can test from internet or anther test .thank you.good bye see u reply soon..from Sophea Cambodia..good luck for you.

많은 분들이 한국어를 공부하시군요. 다들 좋은 결과 얻으시길 희망합니다. !

my big problem in topik exam is the writing part , i had no clew about it . but this article made me feel more comfortable and bit ready for it 🙂 thanks a miliiooooooon 🙂

same problem

hello, thanks for this post i am preparing 31th intermadiate topik exam and i wondering about essays topik?

thanks for this information..now when you are told to write about a countries love or parent love what are the essential things to write???

It depends on the level..

여러분 열심히 공부 하세요

There’s a little bit of spelling errors in Example 2. Here’s some of the ones that I caught:

“카탸가 제 비밀들은 질 지켰습니다.” — 잘* “하지만 우리 지금 만나면 저는 너무 행벅해집니다.” — 행복* “우리가 맛있는 자를 마실겁니다.” — 차* “저는 제 친구 너무 보고 싶어서 발리 러시아에 가거싶습니다.” — 빨리* and 가고 싶습니다*

Also, any tips on how to get Level 6? What kind of essay structure are they looking for to get level 6? If I get all points or at least enough points to reach level, is that how I can get level 6?

Example 3 also has a bit of errors.

“체 취미 축구입니다.” — 제* and I think it sounds better to write 제 취미는* “이 사람이 세게에서 진짜 유명해요.” — 세계* “그리고 이 사람안테…” — 한테* “나중에 아마 저는도 유명 축구사람 됩니다.” — 저도* and 유명한* and 축구선수* “만나면 아추 좋아합니다.” — 아주* “우리 집에 조대할고예요, 우리 아버지게서도 정말 좋아요.” — 초대 할 거예요* and 아버지께서*

I could be wrong, but I think those are some errors.

Yes, those are errors. That’s why example essay 2 & 3 got less marks. Check this post: https://www.topikguide.com/2012/04/topik-essay-writing-guide-beginner.html

Session expired

Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page.

By top 1% teacher on

Korean made easy

Get bi-weekly workbooks to practice Korean with fun bites exercises about K-Pop, K-Drama, travel, and more+

감사합니다 ☺️ I even noticed, that I‘m getting more comfortable to write the words more and more out of my head :) Since I‘m writing everyday now, I remember the correct writing of the common vocabs I use better and I have to check less and less on how to actually write them and so I‘m wasting less time 😊

Bi-weekly workbooks to improve your Korean while having fun

Tailored exercises, progress tracking, real-life conversations, grammar practice, vocabulary usages.

My Korean has definitely improved, and my Korean coworkers have noticed . Sometimes, for me, studying by just memorizing can be hard, so actually applying what I’m learning makes the learning process much faster for me.

Be Consistent With Community & Challenges

Join fun challenges that enhance your skills and maintain motivation. The community will give you ultimate support not to give up on bad days

I am very grateful that I was able to take part of the challenge, thank you so much for creating this for us 🥳 The content is very well organized and easy to understand without being overwhelming. Having a deadline to send the homework challenges also helped me form a strict routine to be sure I completed studying on time!

Finally master Korean!

Easy Korean

Comprehensive workbooks every 2 weeks
30-day challenges
WhatsApp community with 23 learners

Cancel anytime

24 students are learning Korean everyday

Don't take our word for it. Here's what they have to say about EasyKorean.

It was totally helpful! I improved because it forced me to write own sentences 😊

I really liked the challenge! It was good to review some old verbs and learn some new ones.

I liked the use of journal entries to reinforce the language learning. My Korean has definitely improved, and my Korean coworkers have noticed.

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience.

128 Basic Korean Words and Phrases Every Learner Should Know

Looking to boost your Korean vocabulary? In this post, you’ll find the most useful Korean words and phrases .

You’ll learn an assortment of basic terms related to family, numbers, greetings, honorifics, questions, Korean holidays, days of the week, months of the year, common adjectives, verbs and even Korean slang.

And along the way, you’ll pick up loads of cultural insights, as well.

There’s a lot to digest here so let’s not dilly-dally and get right into it!

Basic Korean Greetings and Courtesies

Basic korean questions, korean family words, essential korean honorifics, common korean adjectives, common korean verbs, korean numbers, korean days of the week, korean months of the year, korean holidays and celebrations, korean colors, korean slang, and one more thing....

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

While Koreans aren’t generally your outgoing personalities who’ll casually strike up a conversation with strangers, they’re actually very warm and welcoming—especially when formally introduced by a common friend.

As a guest to the culture, you have to observe common courtesies. Learning a language becomes a lot easier when you have plenty of opportunities to practice listening to the ways native speakers talk.

Seeing these words in use will help you understand better when and how to actually use them yourself. Also check out this post for some Korean greetings , and check out this post for how to say good morning in Korean specifically.

Make sure that when you’re using these question words you add on -yo at the end to make them polite. If you’re not sure how to make phrases polite, make sure you brush on Korean formality.

For some more phrases, check out the video below where you’ll learn 10 of the most common questions and conversation starters to spark up a discussion with anyone in Korean.

Korean culture is steeped in Confucian philosophy, and filial piety is one of its basic tenets. Family is big in the culture and absolute respect and consideration are given to elders.

Koreans have specific terms for the different folks that occupy the different branches and levels of the family tree. For example, as you can see above, there are terms for people in your wife’s father’s side and different terms for people on her mother’s side.

There’s a premium placed on seniority in Korean culture and, in addition to age, one’s social status also has a very strong bearing in social interactions. Deference and respect are shown to and expected by elders, bosses, government officials, corporate bigwigs, etc.

Knowing all that, here are the honorifics that you can use to refer people above, beside and below you in the social ladder:

Nim is used to speak formally to persons older than you. It’s usually used after professions, like teachers ( 선생님 — Seon-saeng-nim) or presidents/CEOs ( 회장님 — Hwe-jang-nim).

If nim is used for professions or titles, shi is used for specific names. It’s Korea’s version of the English “Mr.” or “Ms.” or the Japanese – san , as in “Daniel- san .”

So if a person’s first name is 태원 (Tae-won), it becomes 태원씨 (Tae-won-shi). Always remember to attach the honorific after the first name, not the last name.

아저씨 (Ah-jeo-sshi)

This is given to middle-aged (40s to late 50s) men and is similar to the English “mister.”

아주머니 (Ah-joo-mo-ni)

This one’s given to middle-aged women, a little bit more formal than 아줌마 (Ah-jum-ma), as a sign of respect for somebody older than you. Because this is the equivalent of the English “ma’am,” some might protest its application on them, saying, “Excuse me, I’m not as old as you think.”

Girls use this to refer to an “older brother.” But the meaning of oppa has evolved over time, now including older guys who are just friends. It can also now mean boyfriend. Watch any Korean drama and you’ll most probably hear oppa used this way.

This is what boys call guys who are older than them. It means “older brother” but its use has since been expanded to include guys who are your friends, but older. The emphasis is on the word “older” rather than on “brother.” School seniors are considered as hyung by the freshmen class.

언니 (Uhn-nee)

Girls call other girls who are older than them uhnnie. It means “older sister,” but can be used in a friendship setting.

누나 (Noo-na)

This is the male version uhnnie and “older sister.” It’s how boys show deference and endearment for their older friends who are females.

동생 (Dong-saeng)

If you’re an oppa/hyung or uhnnie/noona, the person calling you that is your dongsaeng. The term can be used for male and female friends younger than you.

선배 (Seon-bae )

In the context of work or school, seonbae are people who have seniority. Maybe they have more experience in the profession, have a higher rank or came to the company earlier than you. These people wield plenty of respect and influence in the organization.

후배 (Hoo-bae)

A hoobae is a junior person in an organization. They’re younger, less experienced and are relatively new to the group. They’re expected to speak politely to their seonbae.

Depending on where a person is on the totem pole, he can be a seonbae for one and a hoobae for another.

For more Korean adjectives, check out this post .

Learn some more Korean verbs in this post . The book “500 Basic Korean Verbs” also has more action words to add to your Korean.

Learning to count in Korean can be a bit tricky! Korea has two number systems, and they’re used for different purposes.

The native Korean number system below is used when you want to count something, like “one apple,” “two bananas” and “10 fingers.” Age, which is very important in Korean society, uses this counting system. The number system only goes as high as 99.

The next number system, a Chinese (Sino) influenced one, is used when you want to use figures for things like telephone numbers, addresses, dates and money.

Unlike the previous system that only goes as high as 99, these numbers go to trillions and beyond. So let’s say you have trillions of apples—you’d switch to this system to count them. Here are the first 10 Sino-Korean numbers:

There’s just seven of days of week, so memorizing them shouldn’t take a week (Plus, they all end in -yo-il).

The names of the days of the week have Chinese origins and taken from the names of the five elements in nature and two heavenly bodies—the sun and the moon.

The Korean months of the year also have some Chinese origins. Wol is the Sino-Korean word for “month,” and it’s prefixed by the Sino-Korean numbers you learned previously:

Koreans hold annual celebrations that reflect their history, values and beliefs as a nation. Here are some of them:

새해 (Sae-hae) — New Year’s Day

This takes place on January 1st and is typically celebrated like other countries around the globe: with lots of food, drinks, music and fireworks. It’s also known as Shinjeong , which is the solar new year in the Gregorian calendar, as opposed to the lunar new year (see below).

설날 (Seol-lal) — Lunar New Year

Seolnal is more culturally significant for Korea—a celebration based on the lunar calendar which has only 354 days to the year. The Lunar New Year is usually a three-day affair, covering the day before Seolnal, the day itself, and the day after.

Koreans often go back to their hometowns bringing gifts for parents and paying respects to their ancestors. Hanbok , the traditional garment is worn on the day itself. Tables get loaded with food which almost always includes rice cake soup and fried pancakes.

삼일절 (Sam-il-jeol) — Independence Movement Day

In the afternoon of March 1, 1919, Korean activists declared “everlasting liberty” from Japanese occupiers who controlled the Korean peninsula at that time. The independence document touted Korea’s 5,000-year-long history and their right to freely co-exist with all humankind.

어린이날 (Eoh-ree-nee-nal) — Children’s Day

Every Korean child is excited for the fifth of May celebrations. They get their gifts they’ve been hinting for the longest time. There could also be money involved. Mom and dad also take them to amusement parks, zoos, malls and museums to give them the time of their lives.

부처님 오신 날 (Boo-cheo-nim Oh-shin-nal) — Buddha’s Birthday

Buddhism is one of the major religions in Korea. It’s celebrated on the eighth day of the fourth month of the Lunar calendar.

현충일 (Hyeon-choong-il) — Memorial Day

June 6 honors the ultimate sacrifice made by the men and women who fought in the Korean wars. The president leads the rites at the National Cemetery in Seoul. The flag is flown at half-mast and at 10 AM, sirens ring all across the country and followed by a minute of prayerful silence.

제헌절 (Je-heon-jeol) — Constitution Day

A country cannot be strong without a codified system of laws. July 17, 1948 is hailed as the day when Korea’s fundamental law of the land was promulgated. Bad news though: the day is a working holiday.

광복절 (Gwang-bok-jeol) — Liberation Day

Koreans raise the flag with a little bit more pride on this day. August 15 commemorates Korea’s liberation from Japan, after decades-long of struggle and turmoil. This is the day the empire of Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces in World War II.

추석 (Chu-seok) — Korean Thanksgiving

There’s American Thanksgiving, then there’s Chuseok or Korean Thanksgiving—a three-day celebration which happens around September or October. Koreans flock back to their hometowns and spend time with the family. Special food, like songpyeon, rice dough filled with chestnuts, red beans and sesame seeds, is prepared.

Chuseok literally means “Autumn eve.” It’s a harvest festival, an homage to Korea’s roots as an agricultural nation.

개천절 (Gae-cheon-jeol) — National Foundation Day

October 3 each year commemorates the mythical founding of the first Korean Kingdom by Dangun, known as the “Grandson of Heaven.” Legend has it that Dangun is the son of Hwanung who descended from heaven and landed on Baekdu Mountain.

The holiday is celebrated with big fireworks displays that are always a crowd-pleaser. If you want a prime viewing spot, make your way to Yeouido Han River Park ahead of the crowd.

한글날 (Han-geul-nal) — Hangul Day

This is the only celebration of its kind, commemorating a writing system. Hangul came to replace the Chinese characters prevalent in the 1400’s. King Sejong the Great appointed a committee to create a writing system that can easily be used by his subjects. From that committee came forth Hangul, a fully-fledged alphabet and one of the most scientific writing systems known today.

October 9, Hangul Day, celebrates this unparalleled accomplishment that shone a bright light on Korea’s distinctiveness as a nation.

크리스마스 (Keu-ree-seu-ma-seu) — Christmas

Christianity is one of the big religions in Korea. Christmas is celebrated in Korea just as it’s celebrated around the world, with Christmas songs, presents and fine food. You’ll be surprised to learn though that Christmas is celebrated more by couples than by families!

Just like in other cultures, colors are highly symbolic and have traditional meanings in Korean culture. White, black, red, blue and yellow are the five traditional colors of Korea.

These colors are seen in the Korean flag, and are rich with history, religion and meaning. Here are the colors in Korean :

흰색 (Heen-saek) — White

Only the noble class and royalty used to be able to wear colored clothing. The masses, who couldn’t afford those expensive color dyes, wore white hanboks. And so the Koreans came to be known as “white-clad people.”

The color, which occupies the biggest real estate in the Korean flag, is also associated with purity, peace and patriotism.

검정색 (Geom-jeong-saek) — Black

Black symbolizes death and winter. It also symbolizes the end of a cycle.

파란색 (Pa-ran-saek) — Blue

In the Korean flag, blue represents the yin component of the Yin-yang. It symbolizes feminine energy—cool and refreshing.

빨간색 (Bbal-gan-saek) — Red

Red represents fire. It signifies the masculine yang component of Yin-yang—creative, passionate and alive. Today, red is worn during sporting events to show team support.

노란색 (No-ran-saek) — Yellow

Yellow represents a complete balance of the Yin-yang forces. Yellow symbolizes the sun, the center of everything. And being the “center,” it also symbolizes the beginning or starting point of knowledge and wisdom.

초록색 (Cho-rohk-saek) — Green

Green symbolizes fertility, new beginnings and abundance. Traditionally, green used to be considered a variation of the color blue.

갈색 (Gal-saek) — Brown

주황색 (Joo-hwang-saek) — Orange

분홍색 (Boon-hong-saek) — Pink

보라색 (Bo-ra-saek) — Purple

대박! (Dae-bak!) — Awesome!

When something positive or good has just happened, you yell this in celebration. Say, you just passed a test or successfully flirted with your crush, you say, “Daebak!”

콜! (Kol!) — Let’s do it!

Poker players say “Call!” to signify that they’re still in the game. Koreans use it to affirm that they’re up for doing something. For example you can say to a friend, “Shall we eat pizza and watch ‘Big Bang Theory’ tonight?” And they can say “Kol!”

아싸! (Ah-ssa!) — Nice!

Like daebak, this one’s another celebratory expression. So be ready with “Ahssa!” when something nice happens, like when you just got tickets to see your favorite K-pop group.

파이팅! (Pah-ee-ting!) — C’mon!

“Fighting!” You’re egging somebody to do something (hopefully not something illegal). You’re bucking him up, assuring him, “You can do it!” “Go, go, go!”

For some more Korean slang check out this post , and for Korean text slang, check out this one . Also check out this video for more on how to use 콜!

And so we wrap up this one here. There’s a lot to absorb in this post, so keep on coming back to this blog to review.

‘Til the next one!

If you enjoyed this post, you're already halfway to having the time of your life learning Korean with FluentU !

FluentU makes it possible to learn with K-pop videos, funny commercials, entertaining web series and more. Just a quick look will give you an idea of the variety of FluentU videos on offer :

FluentU really takes the grunt work out of learning languages, leaving you with nothing but engaging, effective and efficient learning. It's already hand-picked the best videos for you (which are organized by level and topic), so all you have to do is simply choose any video that strikes your fancy to get started.

Each word in the interactive captions comes with a definition, audio, image, example sentences and more.

Access a complete interactive transcript of every video under the Dialogue tab, and easily review words and phrases from the video under Vocab .

You can use FluentU’s unique Quiz Mode to learn the vocabulary and phrases from the video through fun questions.

FluentU keeps track of what you're learning, and tells you exactly when it's time for review, giving you a 100% personalized experience .

Review sessions use video context to help embed the words in your memory.

Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

Enter your e-mail address to get your free PDF!

We hate SPAM and promise to keep your email address safe

Extensive Graded Reading by Talk To Me In Korean

My Learning Center

Easy Korean Reading For Beginners

Looking for the best Korean reading material for beginner learners?

$ 19.99

Product Details

Looking for an easy Korean reading material for beginners?

This will help you have much more confidence in your Korean reading comprehension through 30 short stories about various everyday topics!

If you’ve been learning Korean for more than at least a month now and feel like you are ready to start reading stuff, but you find regular novels and magazines too hard to begin with, our Easy Korean Reading For Beginners will be a great place to start!

First, read the Korean story part. And practice reading everything out loud through the slow reading segment. (Listen to the accompanying audio tracks.) And check the translation to see if you understood everything correctly. We provide you with all the key vocabulary words so you can get the most out of your reading session.

Tables of Contents

병원 Hospitals and Clinics
영화관 Movie Theaters
편의점 Convenience Stores
쇼핑몰 Shopping Malls
서점 Bookstores
동물원 The Zoo
아침 시간 In the Morning
택배 Deliveries
안내 Information
회식 Company Dinners
생일 Birthdays
안내방송 Announcements
초대 Invitations
치매 Dementia
소개 Introductions
야식 Late-night Snacks
핸드폰 Cell Phones
냉장고 Refrigerators

Swipe to view more images of the book!

Reviews by people who have purchased this book

I LOOOVVVEE IT I’m soooo in love with this book! I was worried a little about what level beginner they mean but it’s not that far you only have to now the alphabet and a some Korean words… but in one hour I felt that I learned A LOT for real and started to read a little bit better then I used to.

Another excellent book from TTMIK The Easy Korean Reading book arrived today, but I can already tell that this will be an invaluable addition to my TTMIK library. Such a great idea for a book and just what I need at my level. Thank you so much.

Specifications of this book

Paper Book: 128 pages Product Dimensions: 168 * 230 * 7 mm Shipping Weight: 289g

Swipe to view more related resources!

[eBook] Easy Korean Reading For Beginners

$ 13.50

This ebook will help you have much more confidence in your Korean reading comprehension through 30 short stories about various everyday topics!

TTMIK Best Sellers (For Beginners)

$ 99.96 $ 94.96

Get some of TTMIK’s best sellers in one package to improve your Korean vocabulary, reading skills and writing skills!

“Easy Korean Reading for Beginners” is the perfect book, without fail. It’s constructed to exercise your reading skills in a way no other beginner book does. And you don’t have to wait months to develop skills just look at the first page. It’s beginner friendly right away. The three things I love about this book is that each story is written in handwriting like script so you can practice varies fonts (don’t worry, still super easy to read), that there’s a vocabulary page, and that there’s a page for practicing the pronunciation of trick-er words. So, not only will you be practicing your reading skills, but your speaking skill too. Each story is just the right length as well, that upon finishing each one you will immediately get a confidence boost. Look no further, this is the book you need!

I always find it challenging sourcing good Korean language reading materials that are not so intimidating for beginners. This book has been extremely helpful in building my vocabulary and consolidating all the grammar I learned in the TTMIK Core Grammar series (Levels 1-3). The short text coupled with the vocabulary list at the end of each chapter are all a great way to build my confidence in reading Korean within context. Having both the written text and accompanying audio files have been key in practising my listening comprehension skills. Highly recommended and a fantastic place to start!

This book has been great for improving my reading out loud. Not only that, the vocabulary words at the end of each chapter are very helpful as well. The audio files with this book are extremely helpful with hearing how all the words are pronounced. I am on my second run through the book with some friends this time. I highly recommend this book.

Not only does this book help improve your reading level, but it also gives you a vocabulary word list after each story. You’ll also read cultural tips occasionally, aiding your knowledge on Korean culture even further. If you want to get the most out of this book, I recommend reading the stories out loud to yourself as well to practice your Korean pronunciation.

An excellent book for beginners. A wonderfully designed book that clearly helps you to learn new vocab and understand how it is applied with various grammar points. Access to the audio is a great additional resource

An engaging and useful book. I used it between levels 3 and 4.

The content was helpful for improving my confidence as a reader in Korean.

My favourite book. Started to use it at level 3, now I am in the middle of level 4, and still find the book very useful. The way I work with it is: – first I am listening to the text seeing how much I can understand (practicing listening and understanding skill) – then I read thoroughly, translating unknown words – then I am learning it by heart (great way to make sure all the grammar constructs become automatic) – reading together with the audio (practicing pronunciation at both slow and natural speed). I like that there is a good variety of different situations. Would be cool if there would be similar book for the next levels.

I LOVE this book! I listen to the audios every morning and it has really improved my listening skills as well.

Will there be another book like this for the next level??

We appreciate your review! We are so glad that you like the books!! We’re not sure about the next series for this book. If we publish one in the future, we will let you know through our website and social media! Thank you!

when buying this book, please keep in mind that level 1-3 are considered ‘beginner’ levels. I started reading it when I was about halfway through the 2nd grammar workbook and found that it matched my level of comprehension quite well. I am the type that wants to grasp every grammatical nuance within a sentence though, so others might be comfortable tackling this book a little earlier in their journey. the book is a really great way to expand your vocabulary organically (especially when you find memorising plain lists of words hard, like I do, this forms a great alternative)!

Thank you very much for your review! We are so happy that you find this book helpful!! 한국어 공부 화이팅!

I also like understanding all the grammar in whatever I am reading (in Korean), and I’m halfway through level 2 right now so I will definitely buy this book next! Thank you for writing this comment

I have this book but not the audio for lisning how do i get this

Hi 🙂 Thank you for learning Korean with us ! You can download the audio files at https://talktomeinkorean.com/audio/

I don’t agree that this book is for beginners (at least one month of Korean learning). I’ve been learning for several months – slowly, because my brain can’t remember new stuff every day so I was kind of excited to read something really for beginners, where I can train what I learned already. But this is not for beginners, the vocabulary and the grammar are very difficult for me, for the first story I had had to search online for grammar I didn’t understand because in order to learn something I truly need to know why is it that way. And the other thing was, the font on the first page for every story really frustrates me, it’s a bit hard to read, it’s also not for beginners. Every time I try to read the book I feel very dumb, it frustrates me that I can’t translate the stories even with the vocabulary, the sentences are difficult. I am sure that this a great book for people with more that one month of Korean learning, but not for real beginners…

Hi, I’m Hwayeon from TalkToMeInKorean. Thank you for sharing your comment. We are sorry for how you felt about our book, and we will take your suggestion into consideration:)

This book is awesome for beginners like myself. It has handwritten Korean, a small comic, and typed Korean. We get to see what handwritten Korean looks like, even if it’s just from one person, and we get to see how it compares to typed Korean. There’s one sentence per separated line in each chapter, which makes it easy for us to figure out which word means what if we don’t already know. 10/10, would recommend.

Hi, I’m Hwayeon from TalkToMeInKorean. Thank you for sharing your comment:)

It’s a very good book. I can easily figure out words based on what I understand and know in the sentences.

The videos alone are fine, but I bought the book too and was glad I did. There are cute illustrations, the dialogue written in different fonts, great translataions, vocabulary and interesting notes. I highly recommend buying the package, the videos AND the book!

where do i find the videos?

Really love this book! I’m an intermediate, but it still really helps to practice and improve reading skills and overall text understanding. It covers many great topics and I hope there will be another one coming soon☻

This book makes it so easy to learn new vocabulary and read Korean.

Good condition

나의 잭은 정말 좋아해요. 감사합나다 그리고 수고하셔십니다.

I have been using this book for months, and it helps understand the structure of the sentence and learn more vocabulary

hello, i have never received yet the books that i ordered last february 19, 2019

We’re so sorry for the trouble! Could you please send us an email to [email protected] with your sign-in email address and order number? We will get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you for your patience!

really well made and useful 🙂

This books makes reading Korean so easy! The sentences are easy for beginners to understand, but are hard enough that it won’t be boring if you are already more advanced in Korean. It also breaks down each sentence into the English translation and then goes over the key words from each story. I highly recommend this book 🙂

This book is a great way to improve reading, vocabulary and listening depending on how use utilise it. I found some of it tricky but the accompanying video course really clears up what I was stuck on. Worth getting both book and video course if it seems a bit too advanced. Very versatile resource that makes learning more interesting. My only frustration is the font (on the first page of each unit) sometimes makes the Korean tricky to read but the next page does compensate as it is in a clearer typed font. I really enjoy this book and would love more at different levels.

I’ve finished Grammar Level 4 about 2 months ago but I can’t seem to move on to Level 5 cause I felt like I need reinforcements to master the beginner grammars. This book is definitely what I was looking for. It really helps improve pronunciation, listening and reading comprehension.

More resources

Miss Elly Korean

How to self study Korean - from Beginner to Advanced

PDF Marketplace Go to cart

Advanced Beginner Grammar Intermediate Listening Reading Speaking Study Tips TOPIK Writing

About Miss Elly
Privacy Policy

In this site you will find all the strategies that you need to master your own Korean learning journey

I have self studied all my way from absolute beginner to advanced level, taking in total two years to pass level 6 in TOPIK II – no face to face or classroom course taken, have not stayed in Korea, no close Korean friend to help me – 100% on my own.

I have been there myself and know how lost it can feel self studying without a structured program and directions of what to do at each stage.After going through this journey myself with trial and error, I want to share with other people who are also self studying Korean the most effective, time and money saving and above all, fun way to go about it.

Before you learn Korean

Self Study vs Classroom Learning

How difficult is learning Korean?

Learning resources by level.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Stay up to date with our latest release of worksheets, cheatsheets and new posts on Korean studies!

I have read and agree to the terms & conditions This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Each intermediate story uses a mix of simple and intermediate grammar. This level is recommended for upper-beginner to intermediate level Korean learners.

Ads help keep StoryKorean online and free for everyone to read. Please upgrade to remove ads.

Themes in Korean Lit
Overseas Angle
Book for You

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Quis ipsum suspendisse

[Essay] Magnolia Melancholia

Sometimes, rapturous futures are only reached after passing through the most terrible of nightmares. Having captured the attention of Korean readers with her creative story structure for many years, Choi Eunmi shows time and time again that dark things lurk beneath the beauty and happiness of everyday life. Simply put, beneath the many layers of life is a sea of terrifying and violent emotions. In Magnolia Sutra, for example, one of her most famous works, Choi depicts through fairy tale-like imagination the cycle connecting life and death, a deterministic world view, as well as the heredity of bad karma between a mother and daughter. Choi borrows the forms of fairy tales and fables in her story about a girl named Mulian who inherits the sins of her murderous mother. In this instance, Choi chooses the safest method for depicting violence of a most frightening world. Subverting traditional tropes used by fairy tales, like good triumphing over evil and justice prevailing, this story ends with a picture of a cold, emotionless world. The magical world of fairy tales, which easily resolves conflicts and contradictions, is completely deconstructed by Choi’s icy gaze. Choi is perhaps more aware than anyone about how resentful violence and inescapable hatred are facts of life in a world where people must coexist. Heart-warming endings are not enough to solve the complexity of this world. Literary critic Kim Hyeong-jung’s reading of Choi’s somewhat pessimistic and masochistic gaze as an “allegory for hell” accurately presents the brutality delicately woven into her novels. Life-disrupting death and fiery, bone-engulfing hatred are the reality of our world. The aesthetic of this novel is paradoxical because it paints Mulian’s melancholic life with the sweet fragrance of a magnolia tree. We cannot deny the pain and violence that Mulian faces, but there is immense beauty in how the novel depicts these realities with metaphors that conjure myth and fairy tales. She uses the most beautiful language to paint the most violent world. In The Ninth Wave, her follow-up to Magnolia Sutra, Choi showed real-world, social concerns through a story about a proposed nuclear power plant and the regional social conflicts that surround it. By her second short story collection, A Person Made from Snow, Choi’s fiction began to address different problems from those of earlier works. In particular, she makes careful observations about the way in which the pandemic negatively affected daily life, pouring into her novel the various practical concerns that arose during that time. Choi’s gaze, which was already astutely aware of the violence of the world, shifted focus to confront the various catastrophic situations brought about by the pandemic. The deep valley of emotion that forms when social affects like isolation and transmission, fear and viruses, vaccines and social distancing, come into contact with personal conflicts is an important driving force in bringing out unexpected narratives. Of the many such works, “Here We Are, Face to Face” tells the story of married women who during the COVID-19 pandemic, must cope with an increase in caretaker work. Constantly checking for fevers, proving their vaccination status, using debit cards from the government filled with emergency funds—the women in this novel, who are all in their forties, are denied a comfortable space to exist because of their unique status as mothers and workers in dual-income families. For these women, who work as workshop owners and public transportation assistants, the scope of their work doesn’t allow them to separate their private and public lives. For example, the soap making workshop that the main character owns begins from a “home workshop,” and Sumi, a female driver, has two things demanded of her at the same time: driving and assisting people onto the vehicle. Furthermore, the burden of housework invades their workspace and destroys their efficiency of labor. And even when they take just a short break from work, they cannot help but think about housework, like repairing the air purifier or restocking the refrigerator, and thus do not even know what it means to separate work and home. The women in her novels cry out in frustration, complaining that no one has taught them how to raise children under such conditions; they urinate blood because they overwork themselves attempting to achieve perfection both at home and at work; and they specially prepare vegetable juice for their husbands, whose blood test results can either make or ruin their day. Not only do they have to endure intense labor that blurs the line between private and public, but they also must endure the intense emotional fatigue of being child caretakers. What can save these women who have died many deaths while fighting with their children, their husbands, and themselves? Married women struggling for survival naturally lean on one another, but this relationship can never provide them with utopian solidarity because, as Choi’s stories show us, greed and envy will eventually re-isolate people. These women yearn for a safe place, but the pandemic has converted personal homes into virtual classrooms. Beyond the screen of a laptop, we witness the safest of places—a house—collapsing at the sound of a woman’s pain. Precarious sounds, walls crackling and crumbling, fragile objects breaking—all of these reflect the reality of women who become isolated in the depths of pain they can never share with anyone. And yet, Choi goes one step beyond this terrifying awareness of reality. By simply staring into the face of other women who are in the same pain, women can overcome some of these feelings of isolation. Through a mirror that shows us that inherent in all of us is animosity and rage that threaten those closest to us, we see that Choi’s gaze has come to realize the violence of reality in a different light than before. Hers is not a world that ends with a cold-hearted message about violence, but a story about us as individuals who fully recognize the violence lurking in all subjects. And going beyond making observations about the precarious reality of women, Choi also depicts in a new light the sex of women. In Yours Truly, female friends who raise their children together eventually hold each other back. For example, we have the following scene, in which Jin-ah takes out a pack of frozen breastmilk from the freezer, thus confessing to the first-person protagonist of the story that she is defined by her past and her sex as a mother: “Jin-ah, if you leave it out like that, all of it will melt.” Jin-ah doesn’t budge. “I’m going to thaw all of it today. I’m going to thaw it all and pour it out. Just like you pour water into the kitchen sink.” As Jin-ah says this, she picks up and hands me the stack of papers lying next to us on the chair, her face looking like a good student who used to get perfect marks. Day 9, Day 30, Day 56, Day 98. . . Lactation times for each breast, milk quotas to achieve weight goals, stool and urination counts for the baby. . . All of this diligently recorded over seven months, not a day missing. “This is the milk that was inside my body back then,” Jin-ah says. “It’s the last bit of breastmilk I could have fed the baby. The milk I squeezed out of my body while crying all night watching my sleeping baby. Back then, every day was a roller coaster of emotion. These are six frozen lumps of me from back then, of Yoony from back then. And now I’m going to thaw them.” Jin-ah’s hair is stuck to her cheeks with sweat. “This is me. . . This is everything.” Goodbye. I’m positive that’s what Jin-ah said. Goodbye, Yeong-ji. Jin-ah has stored her breastmilk and all the history surrounding it, in a freezer for more than a decade. She puts this milk and history out on a table during a hot day to melt. Hidden in this scene, is a strange type of affect, furiously going back and forth between the maternity, childcare, friendship, and affection of women. Through this scene in which frozen lumps of breastmilk turn to sticky liquid, Choi makes the reader reimagine the relationship between Jin-ah and the protagonist of the story. In other words, this precarious relationship will disintegrate, collapse, or remain all right. Choi discovers a region that no one else who depicts female relationships has been able to discover. It is neither an amicable nor a hostile relationship, but a complex relationship between married women who are navigating maternity and their sexuality as women. Thus in Person Made from Snow, violence and pain are no longer inherited, as they were in Magnolia Sutra; they melt smoothly. Now, as the critic Kang Ji-hui has noted, the violence in Choi’s novels has transformed into “something like liquid or gas, melting and evaporating with the flow of nature, as opposed to legends with rigid worldviews.” This transformation from a threat that stubbornly persists in the world into something that accumulates and then melts can be understood as a slight relaxation in Choi’s grim perception of reality. Choi’s persistent gaze toward violence is not a cold-hearted resignation that leaves violence as violence, but a desperate struggle to find survival within violence. The novel Face to Face, Choi’s most recent work and a full-length novel that expands upon the aforementioned “Here We Are, Face to Face,” demonstrates a commitment into the future of her study of the sensations after violence. Just as Choi once wrote, we must view life from the bosom of deep time, as if those whom we sensed during the pandemic are both the same people who lived before it and the same people who will live after it. And I trust this commitment of Choi’s. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert Korean Works Mentioned:• Face to Face (Changbi, 2023) 『마주』 (창비, 2023)• A Person Made from Snow (Munhakdongne, 2021) 『눈으로 만든 사람』 (문학동네, 2021)• The Ninth Wave (Munhakdongne, 2017) 『아홉번째 파도』 (문학동네, 2017)• Magnolia Sutra (Moonji, 2015) 『목련정전』 (문학과지성사, 2015)

by Chunglim Jun

Such Small Moments

“When will you rest?” I’m asked this quite often these days. Well, when will I rest? I’ve been teaching more college courses since last year, and on off-lecture days, I work at a bookshop. I spend three weekdays on campus, two at the shop. On weekends, I write and catch up on chores. The potted plant I’d recently received as a gift withered from neglect. It was a birthday gift . . . During busy spells, I don’t take a single day off. Sudden free time makes me anxious as I wonder if I’ve forgotten to do anything. I believe I’m in control of my time and tasks, but lately, they’ve been nipping at my heels. I enjoy the reading and writing—even the other related tasks can’t be separated from the life I wish to live. But now I know. I’m beat. It took me long enough to see it. Reading is no longer a pastime but an extension of work. Sometimes, I suspect that I’m deceiving myself, conforming to assigned roles instead of working with self-agency. After lecturing at the college located a four-hour round trip away, I muse on the subway ride home. I want to distance myself from this life. I want to go someplace far away. Maybe that’s why. Traveling is my only pause. The only bright spot in my busy routine comes with choosing a city and making plans to visit. Every day, I scour the internet for flights and accommodations. No matter if the trip falls through. Imagining is enough to pull me slightly beyond my quotidian force field. I recently traveled to Tokyo. I looked forward to one thing—staying open to chance. To empty myself of thoughts triggered by controlled situations, embracing chance sensations instead. The beauty of travel lies in those moments that let you shed routine-hardened senses. But they now seem harder to cast off. For one, there’s my smartphone . . . It keeps information at my fingertips, but at times, I long to leave it in a drawer as I voyage away. Wanting to at least leave my laptop behind, I stayed up late working the night before the trip. I finalized my students’ grades and pre-ordered books for the bookshop. I double-checked everything to preempt work-related texts and calls. Later, I walked through customs, imagining the impossible: Could I have traveled without my phone? Tokyo was the fifth Japanese city I visited. I had put it off, making the belated journey after seeing Fukuoka, Nagoya, Okinawa, and Kyoto. (I always used the Korean pronunciation “Donggyeong” for “Tōkyō,” getting teased for an old-fashioned habit supposedly betraying my gukmin-hakgyo-era upbringing.)[1] Outside the window the sun was setting as I took the Narita Express to Shinagawa Station. I overheard several non-Japanese languages—Chinese, English, and French. The eager voices chattered while I dozed off. The late-night work had taken its toll, it seemed. I arrived at my lodgings barely awake. I was struck by the sheer number of people in Tokyo. The Shibuya Crossing and Akihabara Electric Town were inundated with pedestrians, and all the restaurants I stumbled on had long lines as if according to script. Like a scene from The Truman Show. Awed by the crowds, I stared and wondered where they came from. Instead of relaxing, I grew tenser than usual, even wishing to return straight home. I mulled over my previous trips. Does the fleeting getaway from familiar routines and settings lead to any rest? Am I not being my own taskmaster, utterly exhausted as I trudge back to the hotel and collapse into sleep? Outside the window, the Tokyo Tower gleamed in the distance with several metro lines passing by in the background. Thoughts crossed my mind, one after another. Being too intent on rest, I was hardly enjoying my trip. Rest by compulsion. The pressure of time and tasks had been replaced by my coercive self pushing me across the sea. Until age nineteen, I grew up in the countryside. The hillside village had only three buses a day going into town. Looking back, the place had enjoyed clear boundaries of rest. Seasons and weather separated work from repose—as an entirely “natural” consequence. For instance, farmers would leave the fields and head home at sunset, and once the cold winter set in, they would allow their bodies enough rest for the coming year. Nature affected the on-off switch of daily activities, and those rhythms set the pace for managing life. On days without work, Father looked after plants and animals. His time was divided almost equally between work and care. Even on off days, he rose at dawn. He built a chicken coop in a corner of the warehouse, and when two farm dogs had puppies at the same time, he cared for nearly twenty pups. Father was delighted when I was given a jujube sapling for helping at a friend’s orchard. The friend’s father said it would take time for the sapling to bear fruit in our yard. Our family took turns looking after the sapling. Whoever had time watered it and kept the base free of weeds. As the seasons passed, we gathered around on holidays and spoke about the tree. Within three years, it bore fruit. In the summer, villagers sat by the stream to escape the heat, and in winter, they swept the snow at dawn, exchanging greetings. Together, we worked and rested. The city, where I could work anytime, pressured me to work all the time. The sleepless, insomniac city disrupted my sleep. Outside central Tokyo lies a neighborhood called Kichijoji. I chose that quieter place for the last day of my trip and woke up early to catch the train. I watched the tall buildings through the window gradually give way to single-story houses. Having boarded an express train bypassing Kichijoji, I got off at the next stop, Mitaka Station. I decided to walk the extra distance. The paths were quiet, and cyclists passed by now and then. I saw locals walking their dogs and reading newspapers in the park. Aside from my travel companion, no other tourists were in sight. My edginess eased. We spotted a used bookshop on the way and stepped inside. The front counter was empty, and even as we browsed, no one arrived. My friend chose several story books in the children’s section while I reached for pocket-sized paperbacks. We had made our selections by the time the apparent owner emerged, adjusting his glasses. He took his time tallying the prices on a calculator. Once the books were in our backpacks, we left the shop. As we neared the small goods and vintage shops of Nakamichi Shopping Street, I saw several places leisurely opening for the day. No rush, no hurry. At a playground with a stately elm, a child squealed and skipped around. My friend and I bought donuts and ate them on a bench. The child left while we sat in the sunlight. A chilly breeze rustled the tree. Perhaps it was for these moments that I traveled. Small moments, an hour or even ten minutes at most. And for the places where those times gathered. Tokyo had plenty of old cafés that seemed to stand still in time. I walked in the door, finding the streetside bustle fading like a distant memory. Shown to a table, I was served a hot towel and a glass of water. My eyes ran over the posters and faded patches of wallpaper as other customers came and went. Some of them were reading, some were waving at others and joining them, some gestured at each other mid-chatter, and some peered gravely at their phones. I ordered the “morning set,” a Japanese café staple, and sipped on a cup of their “blend coffee.” Ambient jazz melodies and hazy indoor air. Now that I’ve left Tokyo, I remember the place as a cozy nook overlaid with small scenes. “Did you rest well?” My travel companion and I asked each other on our return flight. In my daily life, I make different attempts to rest well or empty myself. At the end of those mostly failed attempts, I look to the next try with quasi-resigned hope. One does their best at work, but can they do their best to rest? In his book The End of Work, the American economist Jeremy Rifkin predicts that more free time and less working time will establish new lifestyle modes in the place of traditional culture.[2] This points to the possibility of surplus time encompassing time for leisure or self-enrichment—in short, the possibility of rest. When asked, “What do you do to rest?” most people say, “Nothing,” but that’s easier said than done. To do so, one must do nothing at all. I recall doing the following to rest: 1. Gaming. I once spent a fortnight shut in at home, gaming. I buried myself in the game without going out to see anyone or stopping to work. With my PlayStation plugged into the TV, I barely budged from the armchair. My daily routine went sideways, but my mind was somehow refreshed. 2. Watching TV dramas. When a minor surgery kept me homebound for a month, I binge-watched drama series. My friends had recommended several shows. I’ve been hooked ever since, and now I have several OTT subscriptions. 3. Sleeping. I used to get my sleep in one stretch. But with intervals of sleeping and eating, sleeping again and eating . . . the slight regret over time spent asleep is now compensated by the sense of being recharged.As one would expect, resting bears on the question of how to spend non-working time. Free time will only increase in the long run. Not working as much as others used to make me an anomaly, but now I seem to go against the norm by not taking proper rest. I recently took up table tennis. In part for the exercise, but I also longed for physical learning. While writing my manuscript, I made a few resolutions. First, to separate work from rest. To work with greater focus and switch off to relax. Next, to ward off emptiness and ennui by seeking out new interests. To find occasions, not necessarily big or grand, that move my soul. Finally, to embrace the surplus nature of unproductive time. Doing nothing may be a challenge, but I can still free myself of guilt. These are my only wishes as I embark on 2024. Translated by Sunnie Chae [1] Translator’s note: the term gukmin hakgyo [elementary school], a remnant of the colonial era, was changed to chodeung hakgyo by the Education Act Amendment Act No. 5069 in December 1995. [2] Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1995), 221.

by Min Byeonghun

Letting Go and Living with Mold

Living through COVID-19, a global pandemic, we all came to have a unique story of our own, one that could be shared with others. In 2020, the year marking the sweeping spread of the pandemic that upended the conventional human way of life, my own daily life didn’t change much. I read and write for a living, which I can do well enough without leaving the house or meeting people face to face. I continued to work from home as before, corresponding with my editors through email. The swimming pool I used to frequent daily closed down, though, so I spent more time walking instead, going out to the neighborhood park when it wasn’t crowded. The class I taught was switched to online at the start of the spring semester, but since the class was small, I invited the students to my place from time to time to have class and lunch together. The most notable change in my life during that time was that I won access to a community garden patch overseen by the district office, and became a city farmer for the first time in my life. Around the end of March I plowed the soil; in April I planted seedlings of lettuce, tomato, eggplant, crown daisy, cilantro, and peppermint; I also sowed seeds of rucola, canola, carrot, dill, and radish, and waited for them to sprout. With the coming of May, the crops grew taller by the day, drinking in the sunlight and the warm air. In June, flowers blossomed, dazzling my eyes. I dug out the flowers by the roots and shared them with some fellow gardeners, then brought the rest home and put them in water. I placed a row of transparent bottles along the white wall and filled them with dill, tall with an abundance of yellow blossoms. I learned through the garden patch that flowers of edible plants are just as beautiful as decorative flowers. I had brought nature—the work of my own hands—not only into the kitchen but into the entire house as well, which quite pleased me. So passed spring, and summer arrived. The rainy season that year was uncommonly long. In the central region of the Korean Peninsula, where Seoul is located, it lasted for fifty-four days, from 24 June to 16 August—the longest on record since 1973. Day after day, I would alternately close the windows when it rained, and open them when it cleared to let fresh air in.Mid-August, toward the end of the rainy season, I noticed a suspicious stain on the wall next to the study window. I went up for a closer look and saw three round spots of mold. Appalled, I immediately searched for how to remove mold, then wiped them away using a rag and diluted bleach solution. I was to leave on a three-day trip the next day, so it would be disastrous for the mold to spread with all the windows of the house closed and no one home. When I came home I found that the spots of mold, to my horror, had returned in exactly the same color and size as before. I was utterly dismayed, but I mustered my strength and once again got rid of them. Then I went into the kitchen to cook and have my first meal back home. Feeling refreshed after getting rid of the mold, I wanted to set a nice table; I opened a cabinet drawer and took out a wooden spoon, which I don’t use very often. But something felt off; I took a good look at the spoon and found green mold along the edge of the oval head. A disheartening thought froze my mind: was it possible that everything in the house made of organic matter was covered in mold? I never used an electric fan or air conditioner, as the cold, artificial air didn’t agree with me; during the unprecedentedly long rainy season, the stagnant humidity in the house might have given rise to mold in unchecked corners. I promptly threw open the kitchen cabinet doors and inspected the inside of each cabinet. My gut feeling had been right—a thin layer of mold had formed not only on the wooden spoons, but also in the grooves of all the wooden articles such as a bamboo wicker tray and a plate carved from a log. Even so, up to that point, I was ready to tackle the mold. At once, I pulled out all the household articles in the cabinets and sterilized the cabinets with alcohol. I washed the dishes, let them sit in diluted bleach solution for a time, then rinsed them again with water. Tiresome as it was, three days should be plenty to complete the task, I thought. I felt lucky that only the wooden items had been affected, and was relieved that the books remained untainted. Talking to a friend on the phone, I joked around and laughed, saying the books must be unscathed because I didn’t read much. After cleaning the kitchen, I started on the study. As I dusted off the bookshelves, my eyes fell on the hardcover volumes in the original languages. To my astonishment, molds of different colors—white, green, yellow—lined the angular edges of the fabric covers. The molds were markedly different in color and shape from the ordinary kind that arise in the bathroom or kitchen when it’s not regularly cleaned, and the sight of them sickened me. I had never seen a life form of their kind before. Rubbing my arms to ease the goose bumps, I tried to cool my head, and making an effort not to shut my eyes, I went through each and every book on the shelves. Mold had taken over a good number of them, not only the fabric-covered ones but the paperbacks as well. A volume of Walter Benjamin’s work in English revealed, when I lifted its dust cover, white mold inside the hard covers and on the spine. Without hesitation, I shoved it into a paper bag. Avital Ronell’s Stupidity in its original English was ruined as well. Quarantining Benjamin and Ronell in the paper bag and throwing them out the door, I wept for the first time because of the mold. Not because the beautiful thoughts and words had been corroded by something so trivial as mold; my feelings of loss and grief were for the words underlined in inks of various colors and the notes in the margins. The traces of those days in which I had so struggled to make sense of the abstruse texts had been stolen by the mold. What had been taken from and become lost to me were not certain volumes by certain scholars, but those days of stupidity. Calming myself, I walked past the shelves of books in English and looked through the books in German and French. My heart raced, as I didn’t know how badly the paperback books had been damaged; then I realized that funnily enough, the damage differed in degree depending on the publisher. The pages of the dark blue Suhrkamp editions of philosophical works being fungi-resistant, were clean though faded yellow. Thus the entire collection of Benjamin’s works in German, as well as Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Hegel’s Aesthetics, survived. So did the peach-colored Gallimard paperbacks and Folio editions. As for the French PUF editions, however, pretty green mold had developed along the spines; so the works by Foucault, Laplanche, and Kant were expelled. Scrutinizing the shelves, I grew increasingly cold and desensitized, feeling no regret at tying the books up in bundles and dumping them. Distancing myself from mold was the most critical issue at hand, and I no longer had any qualms about mechanically eliminating, expelling, and isolating what had been tainted with mold. Now came the time to examine the shelf of Korean books. I noted that a shimmering green-gray mold had accumulated on all of the Workroom Press “Proposals” series. I’d never seen mold of such beautiful color before. It resembled rust on ancient bronze artifacts. In admiration, I yearned to contemplate it in silence. These books, I never wanted to dispose of. With each publication of the series, the editor had arranged a gathering with the translator, which I’d attended every time and took notes, in the book, of the translator’s words. Discarding the books was like discarding the vividness of those moments and the words, which I wouldn’t be able to hear anywhere ever again. I searched online to see how to restore books contaminated by mold and learned that librarians in Japan use gauze fabric dampened with 75 percent ethanol solution to wipe books with. I tried the same method to bring the “Proposals” series back to life. But the mold on the covers, made of imported paper, and on the inside of the spines was so persistent that I couldn’t let the books stay in the room with the other articles. In the end, I gave up on restoring them, and shed a flood of tears as I relinquished them. Hearing the news, the editor shared my pain. I sent her the dozens of peach-colored Gallimard editions of Maurice Blanchot as a sign of our days of friendship. So I sent away without hesitation even the ones that had survived—hoping that they’d live long in a safer environment. In the end, though, I couldn’t be wholly indifferent or cold-hearted. As I tied up the severely damaged books, I felt as if my heart were slashed with a knife.It kept raining, even when the rainy season had supposedly ended. September came and the fall semester began, but I wasn’t done cleaning mold. Typhoons raged one after another. Rain fell without ceasing, and the disinfection took forever, with the mold ever multiplying. It was no longer a matter of picking out contaminated books to discard. I had to give the shelves some breathing space. I began to throw away unmarred books at random as well. Otherwise, the infested books would spread mold onto the books that were yet untainted. I scrapped all of Lacan’s Seminar series. A whole shelf was emptied, along with a period of my life. I got rid of all the German books on philosophy, too; I wouldn’t read them anyway. Hegel’s Aesthetics, I sent to an artist friend of mine. I asked my acquaintances if they wanted any of my Penguin paperbacks, and sent the books out in the mail. I threw out the signed copies of books that authors had sent me. I had no choice. The authors knew what I was going through and said they would give me another copy when things returned to normal. I threw away so many things. I had to let them go, without condition. I had to create empty, quarantined space in order to salvage what still had life in them. I had to, to let myself live.Neighbors I hadn’t interacted with before learned about my situation, as I was constantly going in and out of the house to chuck loads of stuff, clutching an umbrella to protect myself from the typhoon. One of them, who lived a floor below, invited me over when I was all scruffy and offered me a meal. When I was absorbed in sterilizing the books, she would knock on my door and hand me something to eat. She sympathized with me, saying it must be heartbreaking for someone who studied books to have to throw them away. Where had the mold come from? From the natural produce of the organic garden patch which I had so greedily brought home? Probably not; no trace of mold was detected at the front door, where I would leave the bag, straw hat, and rubber boots I used in gardening. On the other hand, the study, which had suffered the most serious damage, faced a mountain through the window. The mountain was thick with trees, but just outside the window there was no tree, only weeds in an empty lot. According to the neighbor who lived downstairs, there had been several acacia trees there up until a year ago, but the green space management at the district office had them felled. After the trees had been cut down, rainwater seeped through an embankment into her house during the rainy season one year. My guess is that with the trees gone from the forest, whose thriving trunks and weeds had made for a healthy, self-regulating ecosystem in which growth, development, and decomposition occurred in a cycle, the fungi in the humid air carried by the wind infiltrated my window; the mold spores that would have been kept at bay by the trees settled in my room and extended their power with the long rain. Three years have passed since, but the mold hasn’t been completely eliminated. The mold has done no wrong. All it did was fly when the wind blew and grow when it was humid, according to the order of nature inherent in itself. No matter how much I wiped at it with ethanol, the spores, invisible to the naked eye, stayed hidden in unseen corners, ready to run rampant when the air began to stagnate and grow moist. When I spot such corners, I once again feel the need to empty my space and allow the air to flow. When the air begins to circulate again, of course, so do the spores. In 2020, I experienced something irreversible that manifested itself in a powerful way through human factors—such as a climate catastrophe that included a long rainy season, frequent typhoons, and forest logging—that tangled with nature in the form of mold on the books in my room. Since that summer, as is the case with all inflection points in life, my idea and substance of life have never been the same. Translated by Yewon Jung

by Kyung Hee Youn

Breathe, Live, Rest

When I saw the painting Breathing Space, I remembered feeling like I was taking a deep breath. The piece was part of a solo exhibition, Wandering Mind. The painting depicted a person leaning against a small window of a large building, gazing at the sky—the artist’s way of saying that sometimes a small window can become an unexpectedly vast breathing space. The sky stretched beautifully above the building, its hue a poetic blue. I, too, have moments where I do nothing but space out. On such days, I make a conscious effort not to plan anything or assign tasks to myself. I silence my alarms and sleep in; when I wake up, I give the house a thorough cleaning. I take in the tidy surroundings and gaze out the window—sometimes sunrays pour in, while at other times snow falls in large flakes. During those times, I don’t turn on the TV or play music. I savor the freedom to spend time in my own space. I observe the people passing beneath my window, simply letting myself feel the quiet flow of time. The days I purposely spend in idleness fill my heart with a strength that eludes me on my most productive days. Until a few years ago, I didn’t know how to properly rest. I constantly thought about what needed to be done the next day, or the manuscript I’d be working on at the time. One day, I woke up, and my neck felt stiff—I couldn’t turn to the side. At first, I brushed it off as a result of a bad sleeping position, but as days passed, the symptoms worsened. Stretching only seemed to amplify the pain, expanding from my neck down to my shoulders, and I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. I went to see an oriental medicine doctor who pressed and prodded my neck, shoulders, and back. His diagnosis was as follows: “You frequently experience tension-related pain in your neck and shoulders, don’t you? It’s because when you do something, you pour yourself into it, which results in a tension build-up.” I almost fell to my knees at how accurate his observations were. It was like he had read my mind. He emphasized the importance of concentrating during the day and fully relaxing at night. He told me that I unfortunately wasn’t able to unload the burden from my shoulders, which caused me pain. “It’ll get better over time. But you shouldn’t try too hard. When you’re resting, you need to let the burden go. Otherwise, your back will keep hurting.” I hadn’t even realized how hard I was pushing myself, and that my body was already overloaded. I was used to my frequent back and shoulder pain, and when I started hearing a popping sound in my jaw whenever I opened my mouth, I just thought it was a symptom commonly experienced by people in modern society and neglected it. From then on, I began carving out dedicated time away from work and writing. For a while I threw myself into swimming; these days I opt for an occasional run. I head out at night and just run for about twenty minutes, without a set route. Running at night has its charm—you can hide your face in its shadows. What’s surprising is that I’m not the only one; many others walk or run in the darkness. Running is good for the heart, lungs, and legs, but it’s especially beneficial for your mental well-being. Focusing on each step gives me a temporary escape from my worries. Afterward, I feel light and refreshed in both body and mind. I’ve also started learning the violin as a hobby, and I’m being consistent about it. I take lessons once a week and practice the pieces I’ve learned whenever I find the time. I don’t mind if I’m not good at it—it’s something I do for fun, and I enjoy it as such. When playing a piece, there are rests in the sheet music. These rests are periods of absolute silence, and when the next note comes along, it’s that much clearer. In the passages where the music needs to be delicate and soft, you have to play more quietly so that the emphasized notes stand out. Well-played music has good moments of rest. Rather than trying to excel at everything, I’m practicing letting go of a few things. I was lying in bed, listening to a podcast, when one of the speaker said something I empathized with a lot: “In South Korea, from the moment you open your eyes until you close them, everything is all about competition: catching a bus, taking the subway, making a restaurant reservation.” Though this may not apply to all countries or cities, I believe it holds true for many places that have developed as fast as Seoul. Long commuting hours, repetitive labor, constant crowds wherever you go, a life of never-ending competition. Even when you’re resting, you crave more rest, and just taking a breath feels draining. At morning rush hour, the commuters’ faces on the subway carry a particular weariness. Sometimes they argue, hoping to get a seat. They’re all on edge due to how exhausted they are. I, too, have spent a few years among them. I’ve worked as an editor for a decade now and made my debut as a poet seven years ago. Last year, I edited the highest number of books in my entire life. In the summer, I also published my second poetry collection. It wasn’t a new way of life for me—I was used to scrutinizing other people’s manuscripts and coming home to look at my own, but for the first time I was sick and tired of it. It became hard to make simple decisions; I didn’t have the will to do anything; I woke up in the morning crying for no reason. I wondered if that was what burnout felt like. For a while, I did little else besides pour my heart into the violin. I hardly wrote or read, but I found myself drawn to reading several books related to music. Music revealed new territories for me. Reading Show Me Your Hands, I slowly delved into the inner world of a pianist, and with Lev’s Violin: An Italian Adventure, I envisioned countless violins, each made of different wood, each with their own unique timbre. Reading Schubert, I discovered all the failures the world-renowned composer had faced. Knowing that others have failed brings a smile to my face: it means that they were serious about their dreams and struggled to make them come true. I feel that, rather than success, moments of failure are needed; instead of constantly pushing forward, we need periods of rest. For me, rest is a time to regain a pure perspective on the world. After a deep rest, I find that the words trapped in me start bubbling to the surface. I become eager to reveal what I’ve seen, what I’ve thought, and what I’ve experienced in my subconscious. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to realize the increased importance of a good rest. Koreans habitually go to work even during a typhoon or push through tasks when feeling unwell. But we are not machines—we’re humans, and as such, it is impossible to keep producing and creating without taking breaks. We know this, and yet we live as if it were possible. Rest is a fearful concept for me, even though ironically, I always long for it. I always think, “What if quitting my job and stopping to write means I won’t be able to start again?” I know that pausing doesn’t cause the world to collapse, but I’ve always had this irrational fear. Now my neck and shoulders hurt, my back is damaged, and on some days, my mind is so exhausted that I fall apart completely. I have asked my poet friends what they do when they take a break. One of them mentioned isolating at home and immersing themselves in a movie or book they’ve been longing to watch or read. Another said they go camping or take a short trip somewhere. All their ideas were nice. How wonderful would it be to light a fire in the woods, grill and eat a delicious meal; or bury yourself in a beloved book—splendid! I, too, used to relax while doing the things I enjoyed. Do what I want, read what I like, eat something tasty, go to my favorite places. However, when true burnout hit, none of these activities seemed possible. I needed a time devoid of plans, a moment to pause everything and do nothing. At the end of the year, I took my remaining vacation days and enjoyed an extended break until the new year rolled in. I stood in front of the window—as I stared at the large snowflakes, it almost seemed like they weren’t falling down, but instead, rising towards the sky. Like music played in reverse. I thought it resembled the rhythm of life. My puppy was asleep on my lap; gazing at that serene view brought peace to my heart. I’ve always enjoyed going to the library, the swimming pool, the museum, or just wandering around aimlessly, yet I liked this freedom of being alone, doing nothing, meeting no one, with no music or media. Now, I’ve finally come to understand the beauty of this solitude, one that I do not need to rush to fill. I don’t need to go to cool places—a stroll around my neighborhood brings me a new joy. Instead of constantly reading books, I’m happy to take a break from all kinds of texts for a while. While being surrounded by friends is great, savoring the solitude of being alone is also perfectly fine. Once I embraced this mindset and spent my time resting at home, doing nothing, I began looking at my routine and the familiar places I frequented under a new light. I’m not talking about resting in preparation to move forward, to take a leap; rather, it’s about indulging in unadulterated rest for the sake of resting itself, a complete acceptance of the nothingness that is the self. It is the freedom of existence, of reverting to an amoebic state, a form with boundless potential. This kind of rest brings me back to my innate self. Back to my childhood; to my early twenties when I was passionate about so many of the things in the world; to the days when love was the sole occupant of my heart; when I looked at the world with more simplicity; when writing brought me pure joy. Writing is sometimes like a motionless swamp that offers no answer or reaction. Embrace that lack of an answer, let the emptiness sit there. Do not fear loneliness—step willingly into it and spend time with it. When I ceased fearing loneliness and heeded the doctor’s advice to lay down the burdens from my shoulders, I finally could slip into a deep, dreamless sleep. Good rest isn’t merely a gesture in preparation for optimal movement, much like emptying your mind isn’t just a preparatory process for filling it up again. In Korean, 잘 쉰다 means both “to rest” and “to inhale and exhale.” So, 쉬다 (“to rest well”) means “to take deep breaths, exhale, and empty the body.” This implies that resting your body leads to resting your mind, which then leads back to resting your body in a seamless cycle. I wonder if leaving the empty spaces created by rest untouched isn’t just another way of saying “to be alive.” To rest essentially means to live—not to excel at something or to have a busy life, but rather to feel the happiness and fullness of simply being alive; to focus on the present state of both the body and mind. In September, for my birthday, I went on a trip. I wrapped up all the work at the company, finished the manuscript that had held me captive until dawn every day, and escaped to Yeosu; the sea I saw there was the most wonderful I’d ever seen in my life. It took me four hours by train and then a little taxi ride to get to my accommodation, and once I got there and opened the curtains of my hotel room, the sea glittered beautifully in front of my eyes. I looked down to see the locals walking along the colorful street that followed the stone wall. At last, outside of Seoul, I could enjoy the different scenery and lifestyle of another city. It felt like a breath of fresh air after being stuck in the daily grind of commuting between home and work. With no particular plans, I strolled around with a little jump in my steps; I ate a patbingsu, looked at the cats, and relished the joy that complete relaxation brings. During these empty times, I feel new stories and new desires emerging. The beauty of emptiness. Poetry knows this very well—its charm lies in the space between the lines, after all. Rather than the act of adding, I find the gaps left by subtraction more fascinating. Poetry is a game, a confession of your inner self, a reflection of all things of the world. It’s ironic, but after I spend periods without writing anything, my poetry becomes better, and I feel that the act of writing becomes more precious, and more fun. During my experience with burnout, I learned that any weary heart finds restoration through proper rest. You don’t even have to work hard for it. Whether it is love for someone, an open heart towards the world, generosity towards others, a desire to write again, or a yearning to stand tall—all these feelings will eventually resurface. All you need to do to rekindle them is to bask in these moments of pure rest. I didn’t want to escape from work or writing; rather, I always wanted to break free from the monotonous landscape that was “me.” I didn’t realize that this person I knew as myself, who looked the same every day, was undergoing a constant process of internal change. Someone once asked me, “Why do you write poetry? It seems lonely.” Back then, I couldn’t provide a proper answer, but now I think I can. Poetry allows one to peer into the solitude of one’s inner self, to appreciate life’s empty spaces. It’s the joy of filling the spaces between the lines by leaving some deliberately empty. Only after a good rest do you come to realize the multitude of answers that are out there. Translated by Giulia Macrì

by Ju Minhyeon

[Cover Feature] The Bookstore as a Book

The topic of bookstores always brings me back to a personal story that begins the year before I was born. It was 1980, and my mother’s youngest brother, freshly discharged from military duty, decided to leave his boring old hometown and strike out for Seoul. He had no plans, only some money in his pockets to get him through the next few months. He scoured the big city for areas with cheap rent, and finally settled on a sleepy neighborhood in the Seodaemun District. His new home was a tiny shop with a floor space of about 10 pyeong, to which was attached a tinier room. The shop, he filled with books. The Munye Bookstore. That was the name of my other school—the place where my young self spent countless afternoons, and where—if I may be so bold—I learned even more than at my classroom desk. The Munye Bookstore was a home where my young uncle ate and slept, where my young self would read until I nodded off into short naps. It was also a place of community, where young locals hung out in little groups and sang along to a strumming guitar, and a sort of pub where, late in the evening (a nationwide curfew was in place in South Korea until January of 1982), the bookstore doors would be shut and those young people would engage in debate and discussion over beer with peanuts and dried cuttlefish. How did they end up gathering at Uncle’s bookstore? I’m afraid I don’t know. What I do know is that those young people were, to me, just as part of the bookstore as the volumes on the shelves. Not knowing what title to use for these friends? regulars? neighbors?—of my uncle’s, I would call them “uncles” as well (a few women were among these patrons, but I don’t recall calling them “aunties.” I wonder why?) and grow to recognize them. Employment, marriage, and other facts of life would call them away to other neighborhoods, but they were quickly replaced by new faces. The ones who left, too, would drop in when they were in the area, spot me reading on a stool in the corner, and exclaim, “Hey, it’s been a while! You’ve gotten taller, eh?” Some of those people still get together for meals—although they almost never drink—and to travel together. Even now, more than ten years since Uncle retired. Uncle, why a bookstore, of all things? The question came to my mind after I’d finished my own military service and prepared to return to school, wondering what I should do with my life. At the time I had vague dreams of authorhood, so perhaps part of me hoped to hear that he’d wanted to be an author too. But Uncle’s answer blew away my expectations. Because I was broke. The thing about a bookstore, it doesn’t cost much money to start one. All you need are shelves, and the wholesalers were happy to supply you and get paid once the books sold. And if they didn’t sell, I’d just return them. It was the best kind of business for a poor kid like me. It was coincidence borne of chance, then. But wasn’t that just another word for inevitability? Necessity had driven Uncle to that business, but in the blink of an eye, the bookstore ended up being a perfect fit for him. Uncle’s life revolved around reading books, selling books, and talking about books with patrons. So I can imagine the helplessness he must have felt in early 1998, when the landlord—who’d lost his job in the Asian Financial Crisis at the end of the previous year—decided to run the bookstore himself and refused to extend Uncle’s lease, kicking him out without even paying back the deposit. But I was only a high school student back then, too young and feisty to understand. I didn’t realize back then that Uncle’s youth, my adolescence, and maybe a period in Korean history, too, had ended forever. Uncle opened up a new business near a local university. The new shop was packed with books on every wall save the door, but did not have a little side room where people discussed their books, or display shelves where interesting reads were proudly exhibited for all. Instead, the center of the floor was taken up by two rows of low shelves. Uncle’s new business was not a bookstore, but a chaekbang (book rental store) where patrons could rent comic books and novels. Unlike the ever-bright Munye Bookstore, the Kkaebi Bookshop (the most popular book rental franchise at the time) was dark, and the books stained by all the hands that had flipped through their pages. Uncle’s chaekbang started off on a downward spiral, which went on and on until the other franchise stores closed and the head office, too, finally closed the curtains in 2010. Munye Bookstore, stolen from Uncle by the landlord, had long since shuttered its doors by then. If the financial crisis had been the death knell for Uncle’s bookstore, online bookstores would be the nail in the coffin for all the other physical bookstores, big and small. And I was there to see it all. While in the military, I became a Platinum-rank customer with an online bookstore, the credit card payments for which led me to take a logging job for an online store’s book database straight out of the army. In the summer of 2006, only one term away from my undergraduate degree, I became a full-time employee at an online bookstore. I was the merchandiser who oversaw books in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and history sections. Looking back, I must have learned everything I needed to know about books from Uncle’s shop. In On the Commerce of Thought by Jean-Luc Nancy, subtitled Of Books and Bookstores, Nancy explains, for the bookseller, the act of reading a book is both a lectio (reading) and an electio (choosing): “The bookseller. . . brings [books] and exposes them, giving them the vantage from which to play their role as subjects.” Over the three years and six months I spent at that workplace, I tried to think of myself as a “book deliverer.” An individual who procures books, displays them, and creates the right environment for them to play leading roles of their own. But reality didn’t quite work that way. Unlike flesh-and-blood customers I could see at a physical bookstore, online readers were faceless statistics. And it was no easy task to deliver anything to faceless statistics. Worse, even the books were formless statistics! Although almost every book in existence was recorded in these online databases, they were utterly devoid of scent and difficult to estimate their thickness. They were completely flat. Although I could look up any book I could think of with the touch of a finger, I could neither turn them over in my hands nor look at the books around them, nor simply stroll through their presence. I was sick of work, I wanted to read only for the pleasure of it, I wanted to write for myself, I said, making up one excuse after another as I quit my job. But looking back, I think I know the real reason: the faceless readers and the formless books. Long story short, after quitting my job, I became a writer—a book reviewer, to be precise—and continued to maintain my Platinum membership with all my book purchases. All the while, small bookstores around the country continued to shutter their doors. But I was so busy reading and writing that without any awareness of the issues at hand, I considered this phenomenon part of a natural progression, as unavoidable as the disappearance of record stores and video rental shops. Then, in 2015, I saw the tides of change. I saw the rise of independent publications, and the continued growth of Unlimited Edition, a book fair specializing in independent books. So-called independent bookstores underwent a Renaissance (to exaggerate mildly), with more and more articles covering the “revival of neighborhood bookstores” and the “small bookstore boom.” But—strangely, thinking back—I wasn’t particularly interested. Not interested at all, in fact. Was I just that sick of bookstores? Was I just that steeped in the traditional publishing system? Or maybe I no longer felt the need to be a reader of the book deliverers. My shelves had long since been packed with more volumes than those that had filled the walls of the Munye Bookstore. Then, in 2016, I received an email from Iro, the owner of first-generation independent bookstore Your Mind and organizer of Unlimited Edition. At the time, the rapid growth of local, or small, or independent bookstores had led to reader concerns that the quality of such establishments might decline. Iro’s proposal was that I join a bookstore exploration project that would examine the differences between these bookstores, learn about the bookstore owners’ outlooks, and the challenges they faced in their work. I accepted and spent one month with novelist Kim Junghyuk meeting the owners of eight wildly different independent bookstores for open interviews. (The transcripts have been published in a book titled Bookstore Exploration and include lectures from two Japanese bookstore owners as well as the transcript of a group conversation between four Korean bookstore owners.) To confess, even as I started the first interview, I was skeptical. The napkin math just didn’t add up: these businesses didn’t look like they could afford the rent, let alone make a profit. I saw my uncle lose his bookstore. I saw the thieving landlord bungle the business in just a few years. I saw my uncle’s book rental store wither away with the times. To me, independent bookstore owners were naïve romantics, no different from Don Quixote. Let me begin with the conclusion: I was being conceited and judgmental. These bookstore owners, naturally, were all aware of the potential problems. But they worked away at what they could, where they could. They led the charge of bookstores specializing in independently-published books, LGBT works, theme-rotating publications, artbooks, and travelogues, charging ahead alongside local bookstores big and small, and making all sorts of impacts on their communities. Just like Uncle’s Munye Bookstore all those years ago. Although the variety and quality of perspectives have since skyrocketed, the essence of these spaces remains unchanged: a sanctuary for people with non-mainstream interests. As an author whose works appeal largely to people with non-mainstream interests—that is to say, as an author with a fandom of minuscule proportions—I empathize wholeheartedly. My bookstore events are attended by anywhere from four or five to no more than thirty to forty people, but those events are comforting. At those events, I see the faces of my readers, breathe the same air as my readers, and share certain emotions with my readers. But in a big meet-and-greet at a cinema, for example, I sometimes break into cold sweat, and not just because of the sheer number of people. And not just because of the small differences between book readers and movie audiences. I attribute it to the setting. A cinema is not a place for communication. When I’m at the front, I see the audiences watch me as though watching a film (one in which they recognize neither the actors nor the director), with arms crossed. A bookstore, on the other hand, is a place of exchange. In a bookstore, the readers and I—because I prefer discussions to lectures wherever possible—speak and respond as though having a conversation. One experience that opened my eyes to the power of bookstores took place last spring at Goyo Bookshop, an independent establishment in Haebangchon specializing in literature. I led a seven-session workshop titled “A Writing Style Workshop for Those Lost Amidst Sentences.” A serial event like this was a first for the venue, which generally hosted one-off book discussions. Because space was limited, we capped the number of participants, which meant that registrations closed almost instantly. To confess, I was once again skeptical. I’d only elected to lead a workshop rather than a lecture series because I thought it would be easier for me, but then I realized that lectures might have been easier after all: once I’d prepared a lecture, most of the sessions would have been under my full control. In a workshop, I would never know just how much to prepare or what direction the participants might decide to go. What if no one spoke up? Or what if we went off on tangents? For me, reading had always been a solitary activity, which was the very reason I loved it. Once more, I was proven a fool. In a book talk, most participants are fans of the author. In this workshop, half the participants didn’t know me, and didn’t particularly care even after I introduced myself (they were diehard fans of Goyo Bookshop). In spite of that, reading and discussing the same book together was supremely fun, occasionally thrilling, and ultimately moving. I finally understood (and not just with my head) that books were not unchanging monoliths. Different readers, places, and contexts gave them entirely new meaning, and at times, different perspectives on the same book would entangle and generate a completely new chemical reaction. How should I put it? Jonas Mekas must have read my mind when he wrote Requiem for a Manual Typewriter, in which he said: “Ah, if you have never experienced it, been with it, no use telling it to you, you’ll never understand it.” Translated by Slin Jung

by Keum Jungyun

[Cover Feature] Where Literary Experience Meets the Personal

"If books take us to new worlds such as we have never seen before, it is bookstores that provide the passage to those chance meetings,” wrote the author Kim Choyeop. Tucked away in the city’s alleys, small bookstores provide an intimate space for those wishing to embrace the literary experience of reading and writing. At small bookstores, we stumble upon new discoveries and the experiences that go with them. And when we pursue those chance meetings, intentionally or spontaneously, we find ourselves part of a community of readers sharing a range of interests.Why Small Bookstores Are on the Rise Local bookstores, once a venerable neighborhood fixture, are steadily on the decline. This year alone saw the closure of Chuncheon’s Kwangjang Books, established in 1999, and Suwon’s Kyomoon Books, which opened its doors in 1986, while Daejeon’s best-known local bookstore, Gyeryong Books, founded in 1966, is struggling to pay the rent. On the other hand, oddly enough, new independent bookstores are popping up every week. The proliferation of independent bookstores, however, is unfortunately not due to an influx of readers discovering a newfound love for books and the joy of reading. In practice, the reasons are more varied than that. The first is the popularization of social media. Independent bookstores are often located in areas with less foot traffic. You usually find independent bookstores in small, hidden alleys, at basement level or on higher floors, say, second or fifth, rather than on the ground floor. More often than not, these stores bear only the most discreet of signage and hardly advertise. How do readers find these out-of-the-way booksellers, then? The answer is social media. Connected by chance online, the reader seeks out the bookstore offline. Online encounters lead to physical meetings, sometimes developing into loyal followings. The second reason can be found in changes in the publishing industry. The boundaries between independent and commercial publishing have been blurred as special editions and zines abound, with authors, illustrators, and content creators from various walks of life selling their own publications. Bypassing the traditional publishing system, they enjoy greater freedom selling their wares through independent bookstores. As independent publications and editions increase, so do independent bookstores, which in turn encourages and feeds this boom in diverse publications. Third, running an independent bookstore can be combined with one’s primary job. Not only those who already work in the industry such as writers, publishers, editors, designers, or book bloggers, but pharmacists, lawyers, bartenders, IT developers, and videographers have been known to take up bookselling on the side. These bookstores operate at flexible hours. There are nocturnal bookstores, bookstores open only on the weekend, or bookstores that run as pop-ups. Not that running a bookstore in tandem with one’s day job is easy work, but it is true that, compared to other businesses, it doesn’t require much capital or highly technical expertise to start one. Fourth, readers’ needs are expanding and changing. From a bookseller’s point of view, this is the most important reason. We live in an age that treats values as consumable goods. The independent bookseller must appeal to the customer’s heart. It’s the only way to compete with the discount pricing, loyalty points, and same-day delivery offered by chain bookstores, with their slick advertising videos. Which is why, at my bookstore, Yeonhui, the emphasis is on providing the reader with experiences. By this I mean not just the experience of buying books, but of reading, writing, and creating them.Reading Together In-Store Finding time for oneself can be a challenge in today’s busy world. Going to a brick-and-mortar store in person takes time and effort in an age when, with a few clicks, it’s possible to have books chosen and delivered to one’s doorstep in the same afternoon. With that in mind, imagine setting out to a small bookstore. The experience of buying books there starts with leaving the house. At the store, you browse on your own, without searching for adverts or reviews online. The lighting and temperature are just right for the books on display. Sometimes, seasonal music or scents complete the background. You discover a signed copy here, a favorite book there. Then there are the small pleasures of receiving a bookmark or postcard with your purchase, wrapped in that store’s distinctive paper. You might choose to read in-store, or take your books to a nearby park or café. Outside of the business of buying and selling books, the most important function of a bookstore is to provide its customers with literary experiences. By literary, I am not referring to the mere act of reading novels, essays, or poetry, but learning how to explore thoughts and emotions, values and meaning, through artistic language or images. Book clubs and author events are the most common type of event offering such experiences. Gone is the age of authors only speaking through their books. Authors are no longer mythical creatures, but ordinary people living lives much like those of their readers. This realization makes the reader feel closer to the writer than ever. In some cases, such small meetings have led to authors being discovered by readers or going on to achieve fandoms of their own. At Yeonhui, we host about two book talks a month for authors introducing their new works. We always take questions in advance and set aside a good portion for Q&A so it doesn’t become a one-sided event. Yeonhui also hosts Wolgandokseo, a monthly online book club, sometimes with the editor of said book participating. We also offer workshops devoted to reading various titles in the humanities under a particular theme. Then there are reading challenges held randomly on group chats for readers who crave company but find it difficult to come in-store. One of our most popular events is the annual Year-End Book Adjustment, in which participants share their reading experiences of that year. People swap their reading lists with others and share the books they enjoyed or hated, the ones they recommend or intend to offer as gifts. The participants thoroughly enjoy talking about their reading habits and what they’ve learned through books that year. This is the one event I take part in as a reader and not a leader. Writing, Recording, Creating After reading, the next step is writing. There’s a saying that there are more writers than readers in Korea these days. Or, as some put it, those who read, write. Bypassing the traditional channels of new writers’ contests or similar competitions, today anyone can become a writer. Of course, as Tolstoy said, nothing can be gained in fits and starts, but one must start somewhere. There is a platform for every kind of keyword, from poetry and fiction to webtoons, web novels, essays, business, and self-improvement. Publishers and IT companies make it easy for anyone to publish their work and be discovered by developing writing platforms. Self-publishing physical books, too, is easier than ever. Which might explain why the majority of those frequenting small bookstores express an interest in writing. Not necessarily because they aspire to become a famous author or to write full time, but because they see writing as a means of self-reflection, a healing pastime. Which brings me to Yeonhui’s writing workshop, a favorite with our customers. At the workshop, everyone becomes friends. Participants read their work out loud and listen to the works of others. Laughter and tears are shared. Through that person’s writing, it’s possible to catch a closer glimpse of who they are than even their family or friends have ever seen. And so the workshop writers are drawn more tightly together in shared intimacy. Along with writing, the experience of recording is equally dear to me. Recording is different from writing. Text is only one way of recording; there is also photography, drawing, painting, and collecting things. For instance, writing a journal is one way of keeping a record, but so is taking a picture of the sky every day, collecting receipts, or recording conversations with one’s children. The records I love best are of neighborhoods and cities. As a reader, I particularly enjoy records of how personal histories tell the history of a city, of a certain page in socio-cultural history. From writing and recording, the next logical step is creating one’s own book. More and more people write and draw these days with publication in mind. With side jobs becoming commonplace, books can serve as one’s calling card. Some decry the trend, saying it degrades publishing. However, I agree with Virginia Woolf who said, “Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” Take traveling, for instance. One could write about the journey itself, or record one’s impressions of a new place, make a shopping list of the things one bought there, create a scrapbook of photos or postcards, or a map showing all the shops and stops one enjoyed. Rather than writing a thousand things in a secret journal that never sees the light of day, I believe that there is more to be gained by making ten pieces public if you have written fifty. With that in mind, Yeonhui offers workshops on self-publishing, storyboarding picture books, and creating your own postcard book.Literary Experiences in Practice Yeonhui’s customers are a varied bunch. From teens to people over sixty, from locals who live minutes from the store to people who drive several hours to make the trip. There are nearly five hundred bookstores in Seoul, including chain bookstores, used bookstores, and independent bookstores, with around seventy in Mapo-gu alone. Out of all of those bookstores, why do people come to mine? Is it the Hongdae location? Is it because it’s run by a writer? The shop’s vibe? The books I stock? L explains that coming into the shop and meeting other creators, writers, and readers keeps them on their toes. Making the long trip twice a month gives them the motivation to keep on learning, to keep on living. They particularly enjoy meeting people they might not come across normally, saying that it enriches their settled life. P admits to liking the selection of books on offer enough that they wish they could take all of them home. They might not know me personally, but my taste in books is enough to endear me to them. In the end, a bookstore is all about the books. Pretty storefronts are all well and good, but as Arthur Danto says, real beauty comes from stimulating the mind. J struggled at first with the idea of paying to attend a book club. They say, however, that the club introduced them to books they might never have read otherwise, inviting them to think about gender and environmental issues, and giving them a fresh perspective on how to deal with their family issues. Back when the Gangnam Station femicide dragged feminism into the social discourse, countless bookstores around the country read about feminism together. A young man participating in one such event marveled at the questions brought up in the book we were reading, which had never occurred to him before. He went on to recommend the book to colleagues and friends, quizzing them about it over drinks. Their talks and debates were a direct result of his attending a book club. Bookstores not only expand the scope of one’s literary experience, but can aid in self-discovery and personal growth. Which, in turn, leads to new opportunities. K, who participated in a bookmaking workshop at Yeonhui, now gives professional classes of their own on book design. H, who came to Yeonhui as a reader, is now an independent publisher and creator responsible for a host of events. G, a self-published writer, found a partner in illustrator Y, whom they met at the store. B, a frequent customer who amassed a pile of titles on bookstore ownership and completed Yeonhui’s workshop on opening one’s own bookstore, went into business opening a bookstore-cum-bindery in their neighborhood. As for myself, the shop is where I found my co-authors S, a longtime book club member; D, an author who was invited to give a book talk; and M, who came to interview for a job at Yeonhui, with whom I have a new book coming out soon. So as you can see, I’m no different. I went to bookstores first as a reader, and through that experience, grew into a writer and then a bookstore owner. Books have turned me into an exceedingly active person. Reading, by definition, requires an actively participating reader. Video and audio clips play on whether I pay attention to them or not, but books remain forever still unless I turn the page, unless I follow each thought. Books have taught me that every step I make takes me that much further. And so when life gets me down, I read. With each line that I read, I prove that I exist. As a bookstore owner, reader, and writer, this is my take: people who think books are boring just haven’t found the right book yet. If someone claims not to see the point of reading, it’s because they haven’t really had a proper reading experience. Once the mental switch is made that books are fun, or say, useful, one can begin to repeat and expand that experience. And that literary experience, in turn, lights up hidden pockets of happiness in one’s life. Through language, through images for which there are no words, through that which defies any sort of proof. I guarantee that small bookstores will aid you at the beginning of this journey. I, and countless others, have gotten our start and continue to grow that way. Translated by Yoonna Cho Korean Works Mentioned:• Books and Coincidence (Yolimwon Publishing, 2022) 『책과 우연들』 (열림원, 2022)

by Gu Sun-A

[Cover Feature] From Bookshop Enthusiast to Bookshop Owner

I want to start with a confession: I didn’t always like reading. Even into my twenties, I only ever read books for school. But in navigating life and society as an adult, I became overwhelmed with pointless doubt and anxiety—although, as a young adult, it didn’t seem so pointless. I developed insomnia. And then one day, I started going to bookstores to read books. I became a regular at my local bookshop. I even sought out bookstores to visit while on vacation. There was something therapeutic about opening a book and feeling the paper beneath my fingers. It brought me comfort. Sometimes I even imagined that books were letters sent to me from a faraway friend. Before I knew it, I had become a bookshop enthusiast. It’s common for one hobby to lead to another. I attended every event held at my local bookstore, no matter what the occasion. I met authors and fellow bookworms. And through those experiences, I learned to read with greater depth and purpose. Then, a few years ago, I quit my job, escaped to Jeju Island, and started working at a bookshop in Hamdeok-ri. Through interacting every day with other people who loved books, the world of reading became even richer and more tangible. Just a few months back, I left my job and opened my own bookshop in a neighborhood filled with tangerine groves. I named the shop Goyo Letter. All this I did simply because I liked books, because I wanted to be closer to them. Connecting Literature and Music Some say that physically going to a bookstore to buy your books is inefficient, especially when nowadays you can buy anything with the click of a mouse. So why do some people still visit bookshops? As a store owner, it’s my job to attract customers. But I can’t do that by haphazardly displaying books on shelves. I eventually realized that people come to bookshops for a diversity of stories, and not just those you can find on a page. These days, if someone wants to read a book of poetry, where do they go? I bet for many of us, the last poem we read was one assigned in our high school literature class. Many readers think that poems are too hard to understand. They try to read poems not to appreciate them, but to analyze them. Most people’s first contact with books happens through reading text on a page. But poetry originated from song and, for many centuries, was passed down orally. And yet, few people rack their brains trying to understand the hidden meaning of song lyrics. We just listen to the melody and enjoy ourselves. What if that was how we first came into contact with poetry? It is from this very question that Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert, a program I started at Goyo Letter, was born. Adults and the elderly far outnumber youth in the neighborhood of Hahyo-dong, Jeju Island, where Goyo Letter is located. Young people here hardly have the time to experience the arts, and even if they wanted to, this region doesn’t have the infrastructure to support it. Thus, Be Locally Lab, located just a stone’s throw from Hanhyo-dong in Harye-ri, was started with the goal to help young people in the countryside experience arts and literature. Last summer, Goyo Letter and Be Locally Lab teamed up to put on Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert where poets and readers came together to read poetry. We organized the event with the goal of reading Hur Eunsil’s Stories of Recovery to participants, whom we presupposed are “youth living in a time when romance is disappearing.” Stories of Recovery, as its name suggests, is a book of poetry that tells stories of recovery from various points of view. The poems in this collection contain messages of recovery about social and historical issues, including everything from deep personal and interpersonal wounds to major historical events like the Jeju April 3 Uprising to global problems such as the climate crisis. We also read and discussed Hur Eunsil’s other essays and poems on the topic of recovery. It’s not uncommon for bookstores to host poetry reading events. But Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert distinguishes itself with music. Inspired by the way people make streaming playlists, we made a playlist of music and poetry. Hur picked the music herself. Each song either inspired her to write one of the poems or was what she listened to while writing them. Participants listened to the poet read her poems out loud, after which they listened to its accompanying song. This allowed for the simultaneous creation of two types of experiences: poetic and musical. We also made a separate YouTube playlist under the title “Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert.” This playlist was comprised of songs that the readers chose after reading Stories of Recovery. We made a QR code and distributed it to participants so they could experience it again on YouTube after the program ended. Singer and songwriter Yang Hyung-uk also performed a song he composed beforehand based on one of the poems read aloud by the author. Scenes from Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert [. . .] I think I can forgive you I think I can almost write it Why are these two feelings the same? From where the flower has fallen Medicine sprouts At long last I think I can write The name of tender things —Hur Eun-sil, “Story of Recovery 1” Yang Hyung-uk performs at Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading and Music Concert At first, the listeners, who weren’t familiar with this collection of work, looked as though they had trouble understanding what the poems were about. But as the program went on, they volunteered to read poems out loud and eagerly shared their opinions. One participant, a writer, confessed that they were experiencing writer’s block because they couldn’t forgive someone. But as the program drew to an end, they had a transformative experience. They said, “I think I’m ready to forgive them. I think I’m ready to write again,” echoing one of the poems we had read together. Another participant even said they’d become a fan of Hur’s after the poetry reading. I don’t want people who visit my bookshop just to read poems; I want them to experience poems in various ways, through poetry readings and music, for example. I think that such dynamic, artistic experiences can expand the scope of what it means to experience literature. When you go beyond merely reading a book, you become closer to that work and become interested in reading other works. I wanted to give readers a memory that would remain for a long time after the program. Would such a thing be possible had they read the book of poetry by themselves? Perhaps, but I think I’ve increased the probability of a lasting memory. That day, by gathering in one place to read poetry, listen to music, and share stories, we were able to connect on a deeper level, to each other and to the poetry.Connecting Literature with Photography I want to introduce another program that provides different ways to experience literature. The program was created in collaboration with Still Negative Club. At Still Negative Club, people can buy film camera equipment, develop their own film, and share stories about photography. Our collaboration began with a simple question: What would it be like if people could experience literature and photography together? The goal of this program, which we named Reading Photos, was to allow people to transform the way they experienced their photography from “seeing” to “reading.” And then, if possible, we wanted to go one step further and transform that experience again, going from “reading” photography to “writing” photography from their own perspective. The experience of moving visual experiences to reading and writing takes a great deal of literary imagination. My hope was that through this program, readers would discover the points of overlap between photography and literature on their own. In photography, the same scene will look different when photographed from a different angle. Likewise, in literature, individuals living in the same world will express that world through their own unique perspective. Participants were asked to bring a “scene from their life” in the form of a digital file. We developed and printed the photos on site, giving them a physical form, and then linked each photo to a scene from a book we had read. After going around and sharing our impressions, we wrote one sentence about our photo and read them out loud. In this way, a single photo gave birth to an entire story. Scenes from Reading Photography Expanding literary experiences and sharing warmth Bookstores aren’t simply places to purchase books. We come to bookstores to enjoy and experience books in various ways. The traditional way to appreciate books has been to read them silently. This is still the preferred method for most people. But because of the spread of digital media, we have become used to watching videos and are unable to focus while reading text. Sometimes, books feel like a difficult homework assignment, a chore. And there are many people who feel pressured to read books, not because they want to enjoy experiencing literature, but because they think that’s the only way to become “cultured.” For these people, bookstores can be a stepping stone that connects and brings them closer to literature. And we at Goyo Letter are helping them do that, one step at a time. I want to help people feel close to literature through programs that connect books with more familiar forms of art, like music and photography, and I want to let people know that reading texts isn’t the only way to experience literature. In Jinwoo Hwon Lee’s Don’t Think Us So Desperate, which was introduced to participants at Reading Poetry, there is a picture of a large truck driving along a road at night. The title of the photograph is “The Sight of One Person’s Night Passing By.” By introducing this work, a poem comprised of only a title and a picture, I wanted to show participants that, just like how there is no rule that states a picture can’t become a poem, people have the freedom to express their thoughts in ways unique to them. We embodied the literary experience by connecting pictures with books and unraveling their stories. The experience of crossing genres shows that literary experiences are closer to everyday life than we think, allowing people to look at their daily lives through a literary perspective. In the end, expanding our literary experiences is the same as pushing the frontiers of our own world. “Connecting people through books” and “Sharing each other’s tranquility”—these are Goyo Letter’s mottos. In an age where humans are being replaced and virtualized by AI, it’s possible that we might lose entirely the need to meet other people. But the further the world is digitalized, the greater the need for analogue forms of art and life, for standing across from real people, making eye contact, and exchanging warmth. When we read physical books, we experience sensations in our hands. I hope that readers who turn the pages of a real book will feel the need to come to Goyo Letter to meet the person behind the pages. At Goyo Letter, I call the books I’ve read companions. They are here to help. Every day, I come here to look after my companions, to take care of the bookstore, and to maintain the tranquility, the Goyo, that resides here. If you visit this place, I hope you discover your wholeness in this tranquility. I want you to feel your whole self, just as it is, without the need to prove yourself to anyone. And with that feeling of wholeness, I hope you find a book that will become a friend. I hope this book stays with you for a long time, that it lets you know you aren’t alone, that we’re always by your side. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert Korean Works Mentioned:• “The Sight of One Person’s Night Passing By,” Don’t Think Us So Desperate (Siindongne, 2018) 「한 사람의 밤이 지나가는 광경」, 『우리 너무 절박해지지 말아요』 (시인동네, 2018)• “Story of Recovery 1,” Stories of Recovery (Munhakdongne, 2022)「회복기 1」, 『회복기』 (문학동네, 2022)

by Han Min-jeong

[Essay] Let the Face Be (Re)Born

Since Yi Won’s debut in 1992, an intense set of descriptors have clung to her poetry—terms like “cyborg sensibility,” “electronic desert,” “monitor kinder.” These descriptions were an attempt to explain the shock that her unfamiliar imagination sent through the Korean poetic establishment with the scenes in her first collection, When They Ruled the Earth, of people strolling down the street with wires and plugs hanging from their bodies like umbilical cords (“In the Street”). Yet even as they define her poetry in such terms, critics have also taken interest in those aspects of her poetry which break free of this definition. Such critics worry that this imaginative intensity obscures the fact that Yi’s poetry is “a kind of ontological question on a more fundamental level.”1) These concerns ring true because Yi has always been immersed in the question of being human. As the electronic desert is no longer the central subject of her poetry, we can see that what interests her is not digital civilization, but ways of life in the here and now that we inhabit. The issue that has interested her for so long, it seems, is how people live in a changing world and how we as humans respond to these changes. Here the motif that draws attention is the face. Perhaps because of the intensity of her other imagery, the face is rarely discussed by critics, but it appears prominently and consistently across her work. Notably, we often find faces in the process of disappearing or having already disappeared. Take, for example, the faces in “Self-Portrait” from her second collection, A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! Even now, more than twenty years later, they form a remarkable and frequently discussed self-portrait. As I took the mobile phone my face dropped and cracked I picked up a shard and slit my right wrist A twisted vein splits and the sun drops to the ground. [. . .] As soon as I turned on the computer the 17 inch monitor sucked up my face like a vacuum cleaner My eyes nose mouth all sucked in together and only the skin left sliding down over the edge of the desk I pick up my lukewarm skin and hang it next to the new calendar These vivid descriptions—a cracked phone screen as a shattered face, a face sucked into a computer monitor—are the poet’s distinctive way of capturing human life under the domination of digital civilization as we become stuck to our phones like a single body, sharing nearly all our information with them, our senses lost entirely to digital devices. What’s interesting here is that the poet expresses this situation as the destruction and loss of the face. The broken shard of the human face ultimately attacks itself and brings about the end of the world as “the sun drops to the ground.” Why does Yi place the face at the center of this frightening imaginary? What does the poet mean to convey with this image of a faceless person with only skin left over? The meaning of the lost face still eludes us. Scenes of lost and damaged faces appear in The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, where the face is torn to pieces and devoured by bread (“The Mirror Eats My Face”), and The History of an Impossible Page, where the face slips out of itself (“Face Escapes Face”) and faceless bodies walk (“Your Left Cheek”). In other words, each collection offers slight variations, but disappearing and destroyed faces are a persistent theme. Why does the poet explore the face in such depth? To borrow the words of Giorgio Agamben, “only human beings have a face.”2) Agamben quotes Cicero’s observation that the face can exist in no animal other than humans to establish the face as a mark of human existence. From this, we gather that the loss of the face is not only the loss of that which is human but further, the loss of the human being itself, and a world in which the face is lost is a world in which humanity is lost. That is, Yi’s self-portrait as the faceless speaker of the poem points to a changing world which strips us of our humanity.3) The faces depicted in the poet’s 2017 collection Let Love Be Born, however, reveal a somewhat different aspect. While the speaker of earlier poems typically perceives her own disappearing face, this collection finds her describing the ruined, erased faces of countless others. Here lies the Sewol ferry disaster. When the children return with faces crushed by the sea, when those faces must be covered in “a white sheet,” when we become numb or try to avoid the memory of the children—our minds “covered in darkness” (“Night and Day”)—Yi writes of their disappearing faces. To return to Agamben, the children’s faces have at some point become the ultimate site of politics. The most affecting element here is that the face of the speaker writing about the lost children’s faces is also lost. In “Self-Portrait with Beak,” the speaker is “only beak / and neck / and below nothing but / vast horizon.” In other words, nothing is left of the speaker’s face but a beak. write like slitting a pale throat long beak, break through the flesh let us walk again from the very end (the place where words come out) should we call it the railing it is lucky we can still write let us not lose writing cut across smelling of burning meat only beak and neck and below nothing but vast horizon The first thing we notice in this poem is the hopelessness of the speaker, who realizes she no longer leads a human life after experiencing the children’s deaths. But one of the poet’s essays, “Don’t Show the Bloodied Hand” from The Smallest Discovery, in which she describes the face of Francis Bacon, suggests there may be more than hopelessness here. She writes that the reason “[Bacon’s] face fills the air with the uncontrollable scent of existence” is that “his eyes, nose, and ears are unerasable,” and thus hold his face up “until the bitter end.”4) In the self-portrait above, is the speaker’s mouth the last thing barely holding up the rest of her face, and with it her humanity? Nothing of her face remains but the mouth, yet she writes and talks about the faces of the faceless, remembering and grieving them. In that sense, this act reads like a desperate struggle to lead a human life. But why does the speaker grow this beak long enough to “break through the flesh”? Of course, this can be read pessimistically as the loss of the speaker’s humanity—the mouth is all that’s left of the face, and even the mouth is a bird’s beak. However, the poet has written elsewhere of how “the beak cracks the arc the lips can’t” as she chooses the “hard and sharp” bird’s beak in a mythic rebirth, hatching from an egg (“VirginEyes Birth”). Maybe if she uses this hard, sharp beak to write of those lost faces, the beak won’t slip from the children as it picks up their faces and writes about each of them one by one. This bird’s beak is like the “long tongue” that “breaks through the horizon,” the most useful tool to “pull [the children] from” the darkness (“Pocket Knife”) and to maintain, ironically, the speaker’s humanity. In another poem, the speaker “Walked along the hills There were no hills but I walked the hills Who knows when a hill might emerge” (“This Is a Love Song”). Like this walk through the nonexistent hills expecting a hill to emerge, the speaker writes with her beak to find the children’s faces even though they are all gone. Starting again “from the very end [. . .] where words come out” and leaning on this beak as precarious as a “railing,” she risks her own face—no, her very humanness—to write about the lost faces and recover her humanity. Are these not the actions of someone who believes fully in the power of language? When she busies her beaks to bring back those vanished faces, we can no longer say that her face is lost. “In the vanishing, empty air called face” (“Red and Lips, Play if out of Step,” from I Am My Affectionate Zebra), this self-portrait with long beak is Yi’s new face. In her poems we come face to face with the most human of faces, although with the beak of a bird. And this face goes on asking us to lead a human life. Translated by Seth Chandler Korean Works Mentioned: • When They Ruled the Earth (Moonji, 1996)『그들이 지구를 지배했을 때』 (문학과지성사, 1996)• A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (Moonji, 2001)『야후!의 강물에 천 개의 달이 뜬다』 (문학과지성사, 2001)• The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (tr. E. J. Koh, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Zephyr Press, 2021)『세상에서 가장 가벼운 오토바이』 (문학과지성사, 2007)• The History of an Impossible Page, (Moonji, 2012) 『불가능한 종이의 역사』 (문학과지성사, 2012)• Let Love Be Born, (Moonji, 2017)『사랑은 탄생하라』 (문학과지성사, 2017)• The Smallest Discovery, (Minumsa, 2017) 『최소의 발견』, (민음사, 2017)• I Am My Affectionate Zebra, (Hyundae Munhak, 2018)『나는 나의 다정한 얼룩말』 (현대문학, 2018)• “VirginEyes Birth,” Literature and Society vol.134 (Moonji, 2021 Summer)「난생처음 설화」, (문학과사회 2021년 여름호, 2012) 1) Ham Donkyun, “Impossible Elevation, Cliffside Flower Tree,” Afterword to The History of an Impossible Page, by Yi Won (Seoul: Moonji, 2012), 152.2) Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (London: ERIS, 2021), 86.3) This point also helps us to understand the shadow and mirror that appear repeatedly, just like the face, in Yi’s poetry. While the shadow, which must clearly bear a distorted face, acts as a device to reveal those aspects of humanity which possess faint tinges of human being (“Shadows,” The History of an Impossible Page), the mirror is a means to look further into the face (“For the Mirror,” The World’s Lightest Motorcycle).4) Yi Won, “Don’t Show the Bloodied Hand,” The Smallest Discovery (Seoul: Minumsa, 2017), 153.

by Song Hyun-ji

[Essay] The Possibility of Hypernarrative

The Well-Made Narrative and Beyond Let’s take a look at the futuristic horizon of Ha Seong-nan’s novels. Ha’s work has been appraised as having “well-made” narratives which sufficiently embody the traditional structure of a novel. The characters in her stories embody the dispositions of the time period and their stories generate affective, fitting responses such as thinking things anew, reminiscence, foreshadowing, reiteration, climax, and lingering imagery. However, as with so much of aesthetic fate, a perfected form can also be its ruin. Stories with aesthetic potential—that is, newly emerging stories—transgress “well-made” forms and seek to create new forms which ultimately become predominant. I would like to read this dialectic process of Ha Seong-nan’s work in a new way. The emotion that Ha’s works evoke in readers is “shock,” but this is an emotion that a well-made narrative cannot provide. Shock is close to the sublime and the sublime occurs beyond the limits of well-crafted aesthetic. In order to explain this emotion, one must go beyond conventional narratives to explore different possibilities.1 Let’s take the hypernarrative, which transcends narratology, and separates it into its various aspects—the object and space time. How do objects, time, and space operate within Ha Seong-nan’s heretofore unmentioned hypernarrative? Hyperobject In literature, the object usually refers to, first, the background upon which a character acts; second, the props (things) which suggest a character’s socioeconomic position; and, third, the things (symbols) which represent a character’s mental condition. An object is something that is subordinate and secondary to the character. Furthermore, it is something that can be replaced by another object. However, what if we included objects not as individualized matter, but as actors interacting with the characters? We live our lives creating countless strange connections with matter, environments, ecology, and objects. Timothy Morton has proposed the concept of the hyperobject, which includes the totality of all objects brought together in space and time.2 Matter is what connects the human to the inhuman, the animate to the inanimate, the subject to the object. A plastic bottle is not just a drink container, but a deadly weapon that can choke a sea turtle causing it to starve to death. Oil is not just an energy source that boosts the economy, but a hazardous material that rapidly raises the planet’s average temperature, threatening the ecosystem. Morton sees these objects not as a single plastic bottle or an oil drum, but as working together as part of a whole he calls the hyperobject. The hyperobject cannot be perceived by humans, yet it is highly influential in human life as an important actor in making connections. There are many scenes in Ha Seong-nan’s work that show objects as more important actors than humans. Her short story, “The Wafer House,” elaborately describes a house becoming abandoned. According to traditional narratology, description is used to show the reader how the house appears. Old houses are signifiers of human fate. However, in this story, the descriptions are understated in comparison to the “family narrative.” Depictions of dust piling up, of slowly collapsing rooms, windows, window frames, walls, ceilings, etc., and of the characters’ faces and the dust falling from their bodies—all of these objects collectively create the present-day house. That is to say, it is the hyperobject as an actor interacting with the family and their neighbors’ lives. “Flowers of Mold,” a short story appearing in the collection with the same title, tells the story of a man who spies on his neighbors by riffling through their trash bags. The story is filled with detailed, realistic scenes depicting the man digging through the dirty, disgusting garbage. The narrative is not aiming at describing the man’s inner motivations or desires. By going through the neighbor’s trash, the main character actually finds out more about what’s going on between the woman next door and her ex-boyfriend than the ex himself knows. This shows that the object of “trash” has more precise things to say than one person’s suppositions, words, and actions do. Furthermore, it means that the hyperobject of trash has more to say about humans than what people themselves convey with their words and actions. A lumpy, slimy pile of garbage covered in “flowers of mold.” Hyperspace In a typical narrative, space is laid out according to the movement of the characters. Because of this, space becomes a type of stage upon which the conditions of life are parsed and arranged. This space is analogous to the three-dimensional space that is usually perceived by humans. When three-dimensional space is combined with one-dimensional time (that is, time which is flowing in only one direction from the past to the future), it becomes four-dimensional space-time. This is how we usually perceive space-time in our everyday lives. People cannot be in two places at once and the Past-Me cannot exist in the same space as the Present-Me (or Future-Me). This is different, however, in hyperspace. Hyperspace exists beyond three-dimensional space, in fourth or higher spatial dimensions. In this space, characters can appear/disappear beyond the limits of three-dimensional space and they exist in different spaces at the same time. Let’s list some of the results of this. First of all, one object can exist while having a different relationship with humans at the same time. Second, objects (humans) from different times can exist in the same place. Third, objects (humans) from the same time can exist in different places. All three of these cases appear in Ha Seong-nan’s literary work. First, “Bluebeard’s First Wife” starts with a scene of the paulownia tree wardrobe being brought into the house. The paulownia tree had been planted by a father for his newborn daughter in order to create a wardrobe to take with her when she gets married. “I” meets her husband James, gets married after three months, and emigrates to New Zealand for her husband’s study abroad program. She comes to find out that she has been tricked into a sham marriage used to cover up her husband’s homosexual relationship with an underclassman named “Chang.” As soon as she declares that she will return to Korea, her husband attacks her and locks her in the wardrobe. The place where she used to store her albums, diaries and memories is transformed into her coffin. She takes her husband’s straight razor (the object that made her husband appear to have a “blue beard”), slices his face, and barely manages to escape back to Korea. Objects in this story become different things in the same space. The paulownia wardrobe becomes a paulownia coffin and the razor that gives her husband a “blue beard” becomes a weapon that gives him a scraggly beard that he grows to hide the scar she’s left on his face. The objects that occupy one space become different objects at different times. Second, “A Tale of Two Women” is a short story that uses “being in two places at once” as a motif. The main character “She” arrives in D city on a business trip and is mistaken for a woman named Oh Eun-yeong. Thirty years prior, “She” and her parents visited somewhere near D city where “She” got lost in the mountains. When the young “She” finally made it down the mountain after four days, she’d found herself in D city. “She” imagines that Oh Eun-yeong is the other half of herself that she left behind on the mountain. If “She” had never come down from the mountain, “She” would have become Oh Eun-yeong. A few days after she was rescued, a shocking incident takes place in D city (implied to be the Gwangju Massacre.) It is as if “She” and Oh Eun-yeong show the two possible lives of people who have come to different decisions about the historical wound that is Gwangju—two people who have lived different lives meeting in the same place. Third, “Why Did She Go to Suncheon?” also uses the motif of “being in two places at once,” or doppelgängers, but in a slightly different way. One woman is a comedian who gets into a car accident on her way to an event at a university in the countryside and her doppelgänger is a woman who has her photo taken by a passerby while she is waiting at a traffic light. How did this woman become two separate people? It’s all because of a van they encountered on their way home back in high school. The van belonged to a gang of human traffickers who kidnapped women. The girl who didn’t enter the van became the comedian and the girl who was taken into the van experienced a different life altogether before ending up in Suncheon. This is how a woman from one time was split in two and could exist in two places at once. Hypertime Hyperspace has been theorized in many fields, from quantum mechanics to String theory. Since it is imperceptible to us humans, there are many theoretical ways in which hyperspace can exist. Hyperspace is predicted to exist in places such as infinite universes, parallel universes, extradimensional universes contained within infinitesimally small space, and more. But hypertime is not even predicted to exist in theory. This is due to the fact that all the matter in our universe is incapable of exceeding the speed of light. In order for time travel to the past to be possible, you would have to move faster than the speed of light, but this goes against the theory of relativity. Accordingly, in our universe, time moves only one-dimensionally, from the past to the future. This may be the case in the natural sciences, but time travel has long been a pillar of literary imagination. Time travel requires a different dimension of time in order to work, and that dimension is what we call hypertime. Time flows differently for the characters that appear in “Alpha Time.” After suffering a fall, the mind of the character Mother is addled and she confuses her son for a customer calling out “stay and rest a while.” Mother had set up a stall in Sundae Street when the family was down on its luck. “Stay and rest a while” was what the women working on Sundae Street would call out to potential customers. It’s as if the mother is living out her younger days in the present. Among her children are a set of twins who live double or half-lives with even their immediate family unable to tell them apart. The Father had promised his daughter, “I,” that if he succeeded in business, he’d “put up billboards along all the major roadways with a sign that only you will understand,” but his business ultimately fails. Then one day, “I” discovers a billboard collapsing in the forest. The girl depicted on the advertisement wasn’t “I,” so it means nothing to her. She thinks, “I must have my own Alpha timeline which allowed me to see that sign.” This time is the time that exists after the family suffered hardship together. They all live their lives in hypertime: the happy memories where Mother stays; the timeline that is different from the time of the present where promises were not kept, that is, the Alpha timeline where by some strange means the father keeps his promises; and the time that the twins shared between them.Ha Seong-nan’s Novels and the Hypernarrative Hypernarrative has been observed in the work of Ha Seong-nan through objects, space, and time. In Ha’s stories, hyperobjects are not the subject matter or part of the background, but an actor just like the other characters. Hyperspace allows for characters and objects to create different relationships through different spatial dimensions, or allows characters to live multiple lives, or allows them to be in multiple places at the same time. Hypertime goes beyond the flow of single dimensional time and appears in literary devices such as several independently flowing timestreams, going backward or forwards in time, and divergences in the timeline. All of this can be called hypernarrative. Hypernarrative is the narratological possibility for the limitations of traditional narrative to be broken and constructed anew. Translated by Victoria Caudle Korean Works Mentioned:• “The Wafer House,” Wafers (Munhakdongne, 2006)「웨하스로 만들어진 집」, 『웨하스』 (문학동네, 2006)• “Flowers of Mold,” Flowers of Mold (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books, 2019)「곰팡이꽃」, 『옆집 여자』 (창비, 1999)• “Bluebeard’s First Wife,” Bluebeard’s First Wife (tr. Janet Hong, Open Letter Books, 2020)「푸른 수염의 첫 번째 아내」, 『푸른 수염의 첫 번째 아내』 (창비, 2002)• “A Tale of Two Women,” “Why Did She Go to Suncheon?,” “Alpha Time,” The Taste of Summer (Moonji, 2013) 「두 여자 이야기」, 「순천에 왜 간 걸까, 그녀는」 , 「알파의 시간」, 『여름의 맛』 (문학과지성사, 2013) [1] In my recent paper, “New Reproductions” (Sseum, Summer 2023), I examined ways in which recent works of literature move beyond the boundaries of traditional narratology. However, all work to “move beyond” (hyper-) is not wholly unrelated to basic narratology. Only works that contain formal narratology are able to move beyond it. This is because, according to dialectics, to “move beyond / hyper-” refers to inclusion and transcendence simultaneously. Ha Seong-nan’s texts show these aspects of “moving beyond.” [2] “Imagine all the plastic bags in existence at all: all of them, all that will ever exist, everywhere. This heap of plastic bags is a hyperobject: it’s an entity that is massively distributed in space and time in such a way that you obviously can only access small slices of it at a time, and in such a way that obviously transcends merely human access modes and scales.” Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, The MIT Press, 2019, p. 91.

by Yang Yun-eui

[Cover Feature] 212 Versions of the Same Story: Publishing Korean Literature in Japan

Japan is nothing short of a publishing powerhouse. In fact, the country churns out over 70,000 new titles every year. Among these thousands of books, translated works account for six to seven percent, 80 percent of which are translations of English books. The remaining 20 percent are works translated from Korean, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Thai and other languages which together amount to fewer than 1,000 titles. However, a recent surge in books translated from Korean is drawing the envy of publishers from other language markets. CUON, a Japanese publisher specializing in Korean literature, made its entry into Japan’s publishing market in 2011 with the release of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and has gone on to publish over a hundred titles since. The books are divided into the “New Korean Literature Series,” which focuses on contemporary works published in the 2000s, the “Classics Series,” which features some of Korea’s most renowned literary works of all time; the “Short Short Series,” which introduces readers to short stories in a bilingual format that includes both the original Korean text along with the Japanese translation; and the “Korean Poetry Selection Series,” which boasts a number of poetry collections. CUON also began publishing the Japanese translation of Pak Kyongni’s widely acclaimed epic novel Land in 2016, hoping to have all twenty volumes fully translated and published by next year. The Launch of a New Translation Festival and Translation Contest Although translated titles only make up a small proportion of all the books published in Japan, foreign literature enthusiasts have proven to be very dedicated readers. At the end of each year, foreign literature editors engage with their readers by holding events at major bookstores where they look back on the books published over the past year and reveal which titles are in the works for the following year. These events consistently draw in crowds of over 200 people. I have also participated a number of times over the years as a representative of CUON. After seeing just how eager readers were to learn about upcoming titles and how appreciative they were of all the work that went into making a book, I felt compelled to do something more for them. That’s when I came up with the idea of organizing a special event that would shed light on the various actors involved in the book-making process. Thanks to the help of LTI Korea and the Korean Cultural Center, I was able to host two translation festivals in 2018 and 2019. The events were called “Weaving the Languages of the World Together” and “A Window into Classics of World Literature,” and featured translators of Korean, English, Italian, Chinese, Czech, German, and other languages. Participants were given the chance to enjoy a wide selection of events, such as discussions between editors specializing in world literature. There were also talks between prominent translators, including a workshop led by three translatorswhosharedandcomparedtheiruniquestylesbyprojectingsentencesdirectlyontoascreen. I remember the audience holding its breath as two translators began working together to improve the distinctly different translations on the screen. It was remarkable to see the sentences gradually come to life with greater clarity and depth of meaning. This workshop offered foreign literature enthusiasts a unique glimpse into the magic of translation. The event showcased the brilliance of translators, who, despite being such key actors in the publishing industry, often find themselves working in the shadows. Given the many industry professionals in attendance, I was extremely delighted that this workshop could draw attention to Korean literature while also serving as a platform for Korean translators to display their exceptional skills. My team and I have also established an annual translation contest called “Koreans Books I Want to Read in Japanese.” Now in its seventh year, the contest requires participants to translate two designated short stories into Japanese within just six months. While undoubtedly challenging, it offers aspiring translators an opportunity to make a name for themselves given that CUON publishes the winning works. Past contest winners, such as Makino Mika who won the inaugural edition, have gone on to become full-fledged translators and have worked with various other publishers. Some have also broadened their expertise beyond fiction, translating works of nonfiction, picture books, movie subtitles, and even webtoons. The immense popularity of K-culture in Japan has cast the spotlight on Korean creative content, reaching far beyond the publishing industry to encompass movies, plays, and webtoons. It makes me very happy to see that the winners of the translation contest are able to take advantage of the rising demand for Korean translators in Japan. The first year of the contest required participants to translate two short stories from Choi Eunyoung’s short story collection, Shoko’s Smile. Six months to translate two stories might seem daunting, but we set the bar high to ensure our contest only attracted individuals with a genuine desire to become translators. Organizing this kind of event necessitates setting up a judging committee, and to prevent delays and increased costs during the judging process, we tried to avoid receiving an excessive number of submissions. However, despite expecting around 50 submissions, we received 212. Although we were thrilled, this unexpected turn of events required us to find additional judges. I still vividly remember the words of Choi Eunyoung during a book talk following the publication of the winning translations. “While there exists only one Korean version of Shoko’s Smile, it brings me immense joy to know that there are 212 versions of it in Japanese,” she said. Translation and Publishing in the Age of AI The translation contest’s judging criteria place the greatest importance on reading comprehension and Japanese fluency. The initial screening aims to filter out submissions by examining how participants translated a set of ten sentences deemed to be prone to mistranslation. Submissions that pass this stage proceed to the secondary screening, where they are handed to a panel of judges consisting of fiction authors and professional translators for further evaluation. Fiction authors usually favor translations that boast the most fluent-sounding Japanese, while professional translators tend to give the greatest credit to translations that they deem most faithful. While there may not be a single right way to translate, some translations are certainly better than others. What defines a good translation, then? Is it one which achieves fluency in the target language and provides a seamless reading experience? To answer this question, I’ll give you an interesting anecdote from my time working on the publication of Ha Seong-nan’s short story, “That Summer’s Rhetoric.” Set in a time before telephones were widely available, the story features a scene which requires the characters to communicate with each other by telegram. In those days, a standard telegram message in Korean was limited to ten characters, with additional characters incurring extra fees. The protagonist therefore faces the challenge of conveying her messages within the ten-character limit. Translating this into Japanese proved to be quite tricky. Although telegrams were once commonplace in Japan, many people today wouldn’t be familiar with them, so we had to ensure the text was understandable to everyone. Additionally, although many Korean words and their Japanese equivalents are rooted in the same Chinese characters, making the number of characters match in the translation was no easy task. Nevertheless, the translator and the editor persisted, going to great lengths to refine and adjust each sentence until they could make it work. As showcased here, I believe the quality of a translation ultimately depends on how much time is invested into polishing the text. I like translations which read seamlessly in the target language while also reflecting the cultural peculiarities of the original. During the initial screening of submissions for the translation contest, many participants were found to have made strikingly similar mistakes. In fact, some sentences were identical word for word, indicating that several participants had relied on AI to translate the text without bothering to revise it. It was truly a shame. Back when I was a student in the early 1990s, translations were done by hand with a pencil and notebook, and the only tool at our disposal was a paper dictionary. Nowadays, it has become possible to translate an entire manuscript on the computer with the help of online dictionaries and AI translation programs such as Papago and DeepL. No human translator could possibly compete with AI in terms of speed—it’s a total mismatch. This has made it difficult to resist the temptation of seeking AI assistance for reading and translating purposes. In fact, Japanese editors have already begun to embrace the use of AI to review Korean books. That’s because programs like DeepL allow them to translate 300-page manuscripts into Japanese in under a minute, and although the resulting translations are not perfect, they are good enough to allow editors to get a feel for a book’s content. With that being said, while AI translations may allow us to grasp the gist of a text, they are still far from being able to produce a book that meets the standards required for publishing. It is also worth noting that Japanese editors interested in a Korean title will often ask a translator to provide them with a book proposal, which they will often use to decide whether or not to go forward with the translation. The proposal will usually include an author bio, a synopsis, research on similar books previously published in Japan, a list of selling points, and a sample translation of a certain length. Translators may choose to write a book proposal out of their sheer fondness for a work and try to pitch it themselves, or they may respond to a formal request from an editor who has expressed interest in a particular title. In any case, the book proposal is an essential component of the publication process, and I have yet to come across any editors who would be willing to entrust such an important task to AI. All books go through this rigorous selection process before the green light is given to the translator, and carefully translated manuscripts also undergo thorough editing so that Japanese readers can enjoy a seamless reading experience. Korean Literature Filling Japanese Bookstore Shelves In 2015, CUON opened a bookstore specializing in Korean literature called Chekccori in the Tokyo district of Jimbocho, which is famous for its high concentration of bookstores. Chekccori boasts about 3,500 Korean books and 500 Japanese books related to Korea. Chekccori also hosts book talks featuring Korean authors as well as various other activities aimed at promoting Korean culture, which includes one-day Hangul lessons, bojagi cloth-making workshops, and traditional musical instrument performances. Chekccori is also a place for conducting business, where Japanese editors can come to look at Korean books and acquire their rights. There has been a steady increase in the number of Korean books getting published since the bookstore’s early days, which has allowed us to expand the section where we showcase Japanese translations of Korean titles alongside the original work. I used to feel disappointed by the absence of Korean books in Japanese bookstores back in the 1990s, so I am filled with pride and gratitude when I see how much things have changed. Nowadays, large bookstores will usually have an entire section dedicated to Korean literature, and some even boast special displays for individual authors such as Han Kang, Park Min-gyu, Chung Serang, and Kim Yeonsu. These sorts of displays are becoming increasingly common as Korean authors gain more recognition in Japan. But it doesn’t stop there—competition is growing among Japanese magazines to release exclusive content about Korea. In the past, articles used to focus mainly on topics such as Korean food, movies, K-pop, and actors, but an increasing number of them are now devoted to Korean literature and include author interviews and even full-length works. While magazines used to feature translations of original Korean works, they are now directly approaching Korean authors to request exclusive pieces on specific topics. This shift demonstrates how popular they have become in Japan. Moreover, there has been a growing interest among prominent Japanese figures to collaborate with Korean authors. Some have even asked them to conduct talks with them or to publish anthologies together. The K-BOOK Festival in Tokyo All the reasons stated above are what motivated me to organize the K-BOOK Festival in Tokyo, which has been taking place annually since 2019. The event serves both as a platform for new authors to meet directly with editors and readers as well as an opportunity for publishers to showcase the books they have recently released. Held in November, the festival has become a sort of celebration of the year’s literary harvest. Last year’s edition saw the participation of forty-six publishers along with prominent Korean authors Lee Kiho, Han Kang, Kim Yeonsu, Kim Ae-ran, and Chang Kang-myoung. Held in bookstores across Japan, the Korean Literature Fair is an extension of this festival which serves to actively promote Korean books and help publishers fund more book projects. The event consists of creating special displays inside bookstores featuring titles by different Korean publishers. This year, we plan to invite thirty-five Japanese and five Korean publishers, as well as authors Kim Choyeop and Kim So Yeon, and poet Oh Eun. This “book feast” will serve as an opportunity for Korean and Japanese publishers, as well as authors, to gather and network with each other. Moreover, since Koreans have recently been traveling to Japan in high numbers due to the favorable currency exchange rate, the festival promises to attract many book lovers from both countries. As mentioned earlier, there is high demand for Korean cultural content in Japan. However, Korean literature has taken relatively longer to reach popularity in comparison to other types of content. As such, sustained efforts will be needed to maintain this newfound love of Korean literature among Japanese readers. This involves introducing authors whose works reflect current trends, and finding ways to expedite the translation and publishing processes to ensure their books can swiftly reach the hands of Japanese readers. Never before has the need for skilled and experienced translators been greater. Translated by Léo-Thomas Brylowski Korean Works Mentioned:• The Vegetarian (tr. Deborah Smith, Portobello Books, 2015) 『채식주의자』 (창비, 2007)• Land (tr. Agnita Tennant, Global Oriental, 2011)『토지』 (나남출판, 2002)• Shoko’s Smile (tr. SungRyu, Penguin Publishing Group,2021)『쇼코의 미소』 (문학동네, 2016)• “That Summer’s Rhetoric,” The Taste of Summer (Moonji,2013)「그 여름의 수사」, 『여름의 맛』 (문학과지성사, 2013) [1] Translators Kim Huna, Furukawa Ayako, and Yoshikawa Nagi participated in the event.

by Kim Seungbok

[Cover Feature] Let the Snake Wait Under His Weed: The (In)Decision of the Poetry Translator

Is This the End of Translation? “We’d better pack our bags. Looks like all the good times are gone.” When a translator teaching at my university uttered this remark in early March over the advent of artificial intelligence, I thought to myself: “Were there ever good times for translation?” Last winter, as Open AI—the world’s largest AI research institution—was launching ChatGPT, the general belief was that it could completely replace writers and translators. Discourse on the translation apocalypse became mainstream. The translation tools that people had relied on were at most Papago and Google Translate, but now even tools like DeepL have entered the fray. In times like these, has human translation truly run its course? Are there no longer any prospects for professional translators? What should those of us in the realm of literary translation education be concerned about? It is no surprise that in the face of these questions, the number of people translating literature is dwindling. Even though I am a bidirectional Korean-English translator of poetry, as well as a translation researcher and educator, I didn’t think much of these questions at first. But when I saw the faces of the students in my spring semester course, glowing half with interest and half with curiosity about what literary translation was, I was struck by this thought: ‘In a translation course, the assignments that students complete outside the classroom are important. How can I stop them from using ChatGPT to do them?’ So I made a decision. “All right, how about this? Let’s try it out with AI.” In that class, we began to learn more about the theory and practice of literary translation while working symbiotically with AI. Over the course of the semester, we conducted various experiments. My students employed every means possible to translate their target texts. The only prerequisite was that they had to compare the AI translations with their own and write an essay about their observations in which they considered what aspects were important when it came to literary translation. Contrary to my expectations, I had students who were dissatisfied with the AI translation as well as students who were surprised at how quickly the AI translator was able to generate its output. Here are the conclusions we drew after that semester. First of all, AI is great because it’s fast. But it makes frequent, glaring mistakes because it doesn’t understand context. Of all the many genres of literature, the one that remains a definite weakness for AI is poetry. In many cases, AI cannot discern the context or the particular characteristics of the form. That is not to say that human translations are perfect, either. The process evoked many laments such as “AI still has far to go!” and “Just as I thought—poetry is hard!” as well as sighs of relief with remarks such as “Ah, translation isn’t dead just yet! We need literary translators. Even more so for translating poetry!” This was how we ended the semester. Can an AI Author an Afterword? Once I shifted my concerns about plagiarism and other issues into an active use of ChatGPT in the classroom, the semester went by without incident, but I still had not managed to solve the issue of the diminishing place of translation in the face of AI. Yet as I was grading at the end of the term, a wave of dizziness struck me while looking over one student’s answer sheet. The student had responded to a question with more questions: “Why is everyone so intimidated by AI? Can an AI author an afterword?” To write an afterword for a translation, an AI would need to have a translation philosophy and a writing style of its own, but no AI translators meet these criteria. The student then asked about reading speed in literature. A self-described old-fashioned reader who preferred “slow reading,” the student said that because the process of literary translation was intertwined with the process of reading, to claim that human translators were useless against AI was to cede the importance of both literature and human beings. This student’s bold questions and belief in slow reading touch on the issues addressed in this essay. As a translator of poetry, I often ask about the starting and end points of a translation. Why translate, and what for? Translations of Korean poetry into English or English poetry into Korean are not exactly welcomed in the commercial literary market. The readership for this work is almost nonexistent. There has never been a heyday for poetry in translation, nor will there be in the future. So why translate? As I confronted this student’s questions, I was able to question my own motives as a translator. I also realized that the nature of the anxiety we feel in the age of AI is a kind of contamination brought about by thinking too simplistically about translation’s starting and end points. I translate poems because I love them and want to relay them to others. My reasoning may be simple, but my role as a messenger is a resolute higher calling. Poetry is a genre that even native speakers struggle to understand, so translators must have an eye to interpret the works in detail. If my starting point for reading and translating poetry is a love for the source texts, then the afterword I write at the final stop of translation is the mode, the ritual, that serves as the period officially marking the end of a translation project.In that regard, writing an afterword is both a joy and a right for the poetry translator. It is there that I reflect on how I encountered this collection of poems, what I enjoyed in the process of ferrying from one language to the other, what I found challenging, and how I found solutions for the uncertain bits. It is a lot like how we love. The kind of high-intensity love in which you adore something with a passion but must maintain a cool distance so as not to heedlessly fall into it. The afterword is my personal love letter to the poetry collection. “Slow and Quick, Sharp” Of course, not every literary translator encounters every work with this exceptional feeling of love. There are cases where translators are approached with requests from publishers. I translated my first poems from Korean to English in the early 2000s, when Korean poetry was virtually unknown in the world market. I also heard many slights about my research, asking why I was doing such untenable work. For the most part, all translations must endure delays. For example, it took twelve years from when I began translating Lee Seong-Bok’s Ah, Mouthless Things in 2005 until the collection was published in English. The poetry must first catch the translator’s eye, but it must also then stand out in the eyes of the target language editor. That kind of luck is not so easy to come by, which is why it takes such a long time for translations to be published. However, “slowness” here does not refer only to the difficulty of publishing translations. More than that, when we accept translation as an act of reading, this slowness becomes a necessary exercise. Since speed alone does not tell us everything about human reading practices, the much-lauded speed of AI translation does not make our reading more efficient. Thus, even when we talk about translation speed, we need to look at slowness in a new light. When it comes to translating and reading, what are the benefits of high speed? Human translators cannot translate a text they do not properly understand. AI translation tools manage to regardless. Like a human brain, when a user inputs a sentence into AI, the AI then translates it by converting it into vectors (coordinates) that contain information such as vocabulary, sentence structure, word order, etc. Thus, the more data a language has amassed, the more accurate and detailed the translation will be. For languages that have not amassed much data, the AI will make egregious errors and feign ignorance. The strength of ChatGPT is its unabashed confidence even when it has made a mistake. The output, untouched by the translator’s anguish, is crude in so many ways. What effect does speed have on us when we read works of literature, particularly poetry? Do we absorb what we read? In times like these, when speed and efficiency have become of the utmost importance, I think this slowness I describe can be applied as a new value to all reading and translation practices. Reading a poem is not encountering a single, unchanging interpretation. Likewise, translating a poem is not handing down a single, final verdict. Nonetheless, after all their agonizing, translators must make certain choices. Impossible choices. This process involves the dual rhythm of slowness and swiftness. “Impossibility” is a concept that always comes up when we discuss translating poetry. Many doubt whether translating poetry is truly possible. Let’s look at a poem that is often mentioned in these discussions—Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas.” A set of lines reads: “가시는 걸음걸음 / 놓인 그 꽃을 / 사뿐히 즈려밟고 가시옵소서.” Some critics argue that the word “즈려밟고” here should be interpreted as “to trample or stomp on,” while other critics interpret the word as meaning “to take the first step or go ahead of someone.” Depending on which side the translators are on, their translations will differ. Each translator has to make a decision. It is a mysterious and often painful process. Until the last period is placed at the end of a translation, the translator is starting from a basic reading within their own experience and knowledge and spanning out to high-level criticism. This is why I often say, “A translator is a work’s first reader and its final critic.” That is when creativity matters. Because a literary translation (which reveals the stance, personality, intelligence, empathy, reading ability, and language ability of the translator) involves all manner of reading and interpretation as well as criticism, it is impossible to carry out without creativity. One must read the semi-implicit meanings, omissions, and even spaces between the lines, then weigh the number of cases to make a final choice from among all the possible words with overlapping meanings. In his poem “A Sort of a Song,” the American poet William Carlos Williams advised writers to be “slow and quick, sharp” in choosing their words, likening poets to snakes waiting under the weeds. Translation, too, asks the same creative methodology of translators. No AI technology can achieve this. ChatGPT has neither the patience nor the sharp resolve. The task of choosing one of the many possibilities contained in a single word, that creative intervention, distinguishes poetry translation from literal translation, which simply replicates and reproduces. That slow and quick, sharp judgment. Creativity in translation can be thought of in a new way along with certain rhythms, different speeds, that come up during the creative process. In this way, the creativity of translation encompasses the creative reading of both translator and reader. Herein lies the greatest pleasure and comfort that translation can offer. Translators who fret over how to show a work of literature in the best light need the ability to regulate their own pace. To walk the taut line between two languages, staying focused while suppressing the desire to rush across. AI does not know this precarious, thrilling experience. AI does not know hesitation. It does not know the torment that persists until one solution is chosen out of all the different options, nor does it know the dual rhythm of slowness and swiftness involved in making that choice. The reason why AI cannot author an afterword is because it cannot recall any memories of that process. When I am stuck on a translation, I go for a walk or else I cook. After fretting for a while over the inverted order of the words, I will think of an exquisite turn of phrase while driving and scribble it on the back of my hand. That slow and quick, sharp judgment—that long wait—is a blessing, not a weakness, as well as an essential virtue for the critical work that translation accomplishes. It is an effort to rely on my heart and my mind to leap over the gap between two languages while feeling around for the historical, cultural contexts contained in the poems. I am slower than AI, but after waiting like a snake under my weed, I aim to be a messenger snatching up a language all my own. The Subject and Community of Translation Let’s consider the translator’s style. Translators are the first and last readers of a target text, and translations are bound to turn out differently depending on the translator. I’ve experienced this countless times in the translation practicum I teach at LTI Korea’s Translation Academy. Four students translating a text will yield four different versions, and six students translating a text will yield six. No two translations are identical. The subject of a translation is simultaneously a matter of the translator and their interpretations. We read these differences not from the angle of right or wrong but as a kind of gradation. The work becomes richer and more profound. Translation cannot be reduced to merely humans versus AI. Translating poetry is not a game of baduk where the winner is determined by expanding the reach of one’s territory in either black or white. Poetry creates newness. Poetry, which comes from the Greek word poiesis, meaning ‘to make,’ contains the most linguistic experimentation of all the many genres of literature. In making a familiar language appear unfamiliar, poetry is a genre that opens up new ways of seeing. Translation is relatively transparent about the production process of its subject. In that regard, translation is keener to consider the position of the subject. A closer look at the meanings of the word “subject” reveals several possible concepts, including the grammatical subject, the thematic subject, subjectivity, the self as subject, the citizen as subject, and so on. What I want to emphasize here is that, unlike AI technology, the subject of literary translation is a self-fashioning technology that can form different configurations according to its own interpretations. The interpretations that emerge via each of these different methods are a characteristic of literature that precedes other art forms. And poetry is there as well. By the power of its own subject-production, its making—poiesis itself. Let’s look the poet Cheon Sang-byeong’s collection 귀천 as an example. Brother Anthony of Taizé, the translator, rendered the title of this work in English as Back to Heaven. Not sky or paradise, but heaven. Here, “heaven” merges the sites of birth and death into one. It suggests that, in death, we return to the place where we were born. The principle of life that ties life and death together remains alive in the translation. In interpreting this work, the translator depicts the world the poet imagined. He pulls the late poet into an embrace. It is a beautiful and warm reception. In this way, translation enables new births that transcend different languages, time lags, life and death. The sympathetic community that shares translated poems creates a world that is different yet similar to, and similar yet different from, the world that has passed. A place of community and warmth created by translation. The creativity of translation is the seed that grows this community, these “commons.” And the subject of translation is the one who sows that seed. In that slow but sharp, fervent wait. In the era of AI, when I think again about the precarious place of the literary translator today, I think about “the one who sows the seed.” The sower does not linger only on fertile land. They may sow the seed even in barren soil. This seed sprouts with the help of all sorts of forces. No one knows exactly what kind of tree the seed will grow up to be. But what is certain is that it will become something. For me, as someone who reads and translates and teaches poetry, the joy and hope of translation resemble the higher calling of “the one who sows the seed.” Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris Korean Works Mentioned:• Ah, Mouthless Things (tr. Chung Eun-Gwi, Myung Mi Kim, Brother Anthony of Taizé, Green Integer, 2017)『아, 입이 없는 것들』 (문학과 지성사, 2003)• Back to Heaven (tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-Moo Kim, Cornell East Asia Series, 2010)『귀천』 (살림, 1989)• “Azaleas,” Azaleas: A Book of Poems (tr. David McCann, Columbia University Press, 2007)「진달래꽃」, 『진달래꽃』 (숭문사, 1951)

by Chung Eun-Gwi

[Cover Feature] Disintegration of Language: A Translator’s Self-defense in the Era of AI

The task of Hermes—that is what Olga Tokarczuk calls the work of a translator. Hermes is the Greek god who flies through the sky in winged sandals, wearing a winged helmet and carrying a staff entwined by two serpents. He is distinguished by his ability to cross over from heaven to the underworld, between the world of gods and the world of humans, delivering the gods’ will to men. He is one who crosses over, the one who delivers. A translator is like Hermes in that respect, save for the lack of winged sandals, helmet, and staff. What she has instead is a stooped back, stiff shoulders, and flattened buttocks. The body of a translator, who sits hunched in front of a manuscript for extended periods of time, is her tool. When I picture the translators I admire, the image that comes to my mind is people with long-enduring buttocks, not wings; people who carry words with caution, as though they were bricks, instead of moving them all at once. If asked the secret to their crossing over, these translators would doubtless say time. Time expended to translate a manuscript. Time expended—what an uncompetitive weapon in the era of AI. They say that in the near future, translation will be the first profession to disappear. A translator’s time seems fragile in a world that demands maximum results with minimum cost and time. Many predict that translators working for subsistence will be replaced by AI, and that only a handful will participate as supervisors. The outlook need not be so gloomy, of course, but there will come a moment when translators must prove their competitiveness against AI. When everyone was talking about ChatGPT, the first question that came to my mind was: why should humans translate books when AI is faster, cheaper, and more accurate? From time to time, I like to compare a sentence I translated with a Google translation. Google Translate is inadequate for translating long sentences and literary expressions, but on occasion, it generates surprisingly accurate results, filling me with an odd sense of shame as a professional translator. I am led to wonder if my translation isn’t swayed by my own personal interpretation, and if machine translation, which interprets a text in an objective, statistical manner, may not expand the possibility of literary translation. I once imagined: I am at a publisher’s office, sitting side by side with an AI translator. We are translator candidates, competing for the same piece of work (in reality, of course, a translator is not selected in this way). To be chosen, I must make my case as to why I am better suited for the job than the AI translator. In what ways, as a human, am I more capable of successfully performing the task? To answer the question, one must first study the principle of AI translation. Recent AI translation tools use Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology to translate languages sentence by sentence. Neural network systems consist of an input layer and an output layer. When a sentence is input into the system, it outputs the coordinate values of words, syntax, word order, and so on by understanding the context through deep learning. The key is to acquire as much data as possible and input high-quality corpora.1 Simply put, AI translation involves statistics, probability, and calculation. The pros of AI translation include quick handling of large amounts of texts. This method involves a spontaneous and direct movement from one language to another, and is a way of expressing a one-to-one relationship that binds two languages into one. In other words, it is a return to simple language.Is simple language, then, appropriate for literary translation? In this regard, a small seed of hope begins to grow in the mind of the human translator who feels small and insignificant in the face of efficiency. Literature is a fluid and complex system of words that commands specific, emotional, and connotative language, is open to various interpretations depending on the reader, and can change with the times. The first thing a human translator must do to translate intricate language is to read. Reading a work of literature is vastly more than obtaining information. The context must be identified, and further, reconstituted, during which process the reader’s imagination and subjective senses are mobilized. Thus, reading is not a passive act in which one accepts written language as it is, but an active response, a creative act, even. A translator—the first reader—seeks to translate in a creative manner through this process of reading. She ponders the meaning between the lines, and studies the context as much as she studies the text itself. This reading is a task in which translators invest as much time as they do in translating.I studied drama in school, not literary translation. I began to translate because translating theatrical texts appealed to me. Before I start on a translation, I review all the TV shows, radio programs, and newspaper articles in which the author has appeared. I do this to find a voice: the author’s voice. I create a narrator necessary for the task of translation, constantly replaying in my mind the voice of the author, like that of an actor playing a certain role, and read the text in the way the author would breathe and see things. The narrator, of course, is not the author, having been created from my imagination and subjective senses. To be precise, the narrator is someone created within myself whose origin lies with the author. Several years ago, I translated a couple of short texts by Marguerite Duras compiled in “Summer 80,” a collection of ten short pieces she had written for Libération between June and August of 1980. Working on the translation, I looked out every day at the Trouville Beach, where Duras had stayed while writing the book, and imagined her reading her own words to me. I was the stenographer setting down her words and breath on paper. There was a unique rhythm and intonation to her words, and I hoped that her voice had infused itself into the translated text, like a song from a foreign land unfamiliar to one’s ears. A certain hesitance around the border that keeps one from smoothly crossing over, a sense of displacement, suits the language of Duras, I thought. This, of course, is subjective interpretation and feeling—which is how I know what dangers lie in this method of interpretation. Creative translation entails the possibility of mistranslation. With each translated sentence comes continuing conflict. What seems a faithful translation to some could, to me, seem an awkward literal translation—a failure; to another, creativity could seem to be a betrayal of translation. Then there are limits imposed on my time, space, and experience. Translation is an attempt to simultaneously reach beyond a linguistic border and a translator’s limit, and something always goes missing or lost in the process. I once dreamed that the words and sentences I had missed transformed themselves into the author and tormented me. Each time I translate, I feel myself a failure and resolve to do better next time, but I’m flooded by feelings of stagnation—because I don’t know the right answer. What is a good translation? I have yet to find a sure answer to that question. I only know that the narrator I create should not be a reenactor for Duras, or an imitator of a certain language; and that the translation must be done in a language that is whole and intact. Will it be possible if I read and polish the manuscript again and again? As I lose myself in these thoughts, the clock ticks toward the deadline. I wonder if I have ever submitted a translation manuscript that is perfect. All of them are full of holes. Will the day ever come when I’ll be able to say, this time it’s perfect? What is a perfect translation, anyway? Translator Jung Young-Mok said, “The task of the translator is not to achieve a perfect translation, but to perfect the language.”2 I think the statement is based on a beautiful and fascinating perspective that focuses not only on translation but also on the art of language as a whole. A language is not fixed to a certain text, so something entirely new can emerge as a text is translated from A language to B language; and a perspective that acknowledges this new creation, so that language may be perfected, sets the translator free. The holes and dents that occur as A and B come into conflict may become a sort of literary valley, which does not need to be laboriously filled. The valley itself can be magnificent. And if each translator creates a different valley—as each has her own language—how rich and colorful the view would be. If translation is a creative art, then its wholeness and beauty, I believe, have their source in this rich variety. Ten translators working on one text results in ten different texts, as the language we read is not simply source language, but a personal language with different histories and narratives. This language is handed down from parents to children and develops according to education, environment, encounters, circumstances, and personalities; then it undergoes progress, degeneration, and changes with time, becoming one’s unique trait. Thus, the coming together of an author’s language and a translator’s language is a conversation of sorts that can go in any number of unexpected directions, not one in which the answers can be predicted as in a conversation with AI. It is through this openness that we become aware that this world does not move in a single direction, nor is there only one aspect to it; there are so many different facets to this world, which can proceed in multiple directions. Sometimes I try to think from an author’s stance instead of a translator’s. If my work is translated into another language, I would certainly welcome the possibility of varied interpretations. I would also be happy if the work transformed so much that it surprised me, as that would evidence the aliveness of my language. There is a life force that comes into existence only when a living entity changes and disintegrates. Yoko Tawada said, “Art must disintegrate in an artistic manner.”3 Translation, perhaps, is a process of disintegrating in an artistic way and gaining new vitality from the debris. If my words crumble away in a beautiful way, giving birth to something new, then that, too, would bring me joy. Back in the shoes of a translator, I consider the act of crumbling in a beautiful way. If we believe that language affects thought, and that the words we write and translate ought to be imbued with the morals, ethics, and values of the day, the first thing that must be eliminated from the language of translation is discriminatory language, and particularly language that lacks gender awareness. The expression I’ve been wrestling with lately is “그녀,” the Korean word for “she.” In a Korean dictionary, “그녀” is a third-person pronoun referring to a woman previously talked about. The gender-equal dictionary compiled by the Seoul Foundation of Women & Family, however, points out that the word is used from the standpoint of a man to indicate a woman. Considering that a corresponding expression—“그남”—does not exist, we note that “그녀” does put an emphasis on a woman’s gender. Replacing every instance of “그녀” in a text with “±×,” however, may lead to confusion when a foreign language with separate male and female pronouns, such as “he/she” or “il/elle” are translated into Korean. Further, in translating sentences written by an author who lays emphasis on the narrator’s identity as a woman (for instance, in author Clarice Lispector’s works, it is important to reveal that the narrator is a woman), the term “그녀” cannot be excluded. And let’s say that there’s a story about someone whose gender is irrelevant, or someone with both masculine and feminine characteristics. In such a case, do we use “그” or “그녀”? Shouldn’t a fresh neuter pronoun be invented? None of these questions can arise in a simple language system in which two languages are placed in a one-to-one relationship. The questions become possible when language is not merely seen as a means of communication uttered through the vocal organs, but perceived as a complex and multilayered system fraught with social and cultural significance. Without such questions, the originality and creativity found in a translation language will seem nothing but mistranslation. So, this is all there is to my self-defense as a human translator. The AI translator might already have finished and submitted the translation while I’ve been talking away about these hypotheses and theories. In the end, the winner of this competition will be determined by what the reader wants, which is the most reliable criterion. What does someone reading literature want? What does it mean to read literature? Finally, I’ll borrow once again from Olga Tokarczuk in an effort to persuade readers of literature: “Literature is thus that particular moment when the most individual language meets the language of others.”4 With what kind of language do you want to greet this particular moment? My answer, as a reader, is clear: a language with a voice, a thinking language, a creative language, a contemplating language. And this answer is the hope, as well as the urging whip, that I hand myself—reader to translator. Translated by Yewon Jung [1] Park Ocksue, “Error Analysis According to the Typological Characteristics of Source Text in Korean-English Machine Translation,” The Society For Humanities Studies In East Asia, no. 41, 2017.[2] Jung Young-Mok, From Perfect Translation to Perfect Language, Munhakdongne, 2018.[3] Tawada Yoko, Exophony: Traveling Outward from One’s Mother Tongue, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003.[4] Olga Tokarczuk, “How Translators Are Saving the World,” tr. Jennifer Croft, Korean Literature Now Vol. 44, 2019, p. 19. bit.ly/3slOIx3

by Shin Yoo Jin

Family Site STORY OF KOREA --> KOREA.net MCST KOREA FOUNDATION SEOUL SELECTION Korean Film Council GeyongGi Cultural Foundation Arts Council Korea Korean Literature in Translation London Korean Links Go

06083 LTI Korea, 32, Yeongdong-daero 112-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea TEL: +82-2-6919-7714 / FAX: +82-2-3448-4247

Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Race and Ethnicity / Korean

Korean Essay Examples

Behind the idol life: the dark side of music in south korea.

Korean idol group SHINee, debuted in 2008. When they debuted, in only a matter of months they already had 60 award wins and 86 nominations, plus 57 music show wins. They have managed to stay relevant for many years. Some of the members of the...

South Korea’s Culture Through Entertainment

Korea is more mountains than anything else, none over 10,000 feet. The Koreans have one of the oldest culture in the world. According to the legends and myths concerning the origin of Koreans, the oldest and most often cited is the Tangun/Dangun. The legend says...

The Stages of Korea's History & Its Relations with Other Countries

Since the history of Korea goes back through hundreds of years before the division, the facts and description are chosen selectively and briefly. The history of Korea goes through several stages that have constructed what we now call Korea, before the division the nation’s foundation...

Analysis and Review of the Documentary South Korea: the Silent Cultural Superpower

British Broadcast Company (BBC) is known for its string of documentaries on various phenomena, and its documentary on South Korea “South Korea: The Silent Cultural Superpower” quietly becoming a cultural superpower is one that has informed and enthralled its viewers as much as any other....

The Rising Idols: Analysis of Btc Album

The artifact I have chosen is the Korean pop album, The Most Beautiful Moment In Life, Part 2, by the South Korean group, BTS (Bangtan Sonyeondan). This album was released in 2015 and received overwhelming support from domestic and international fans around the globe. This...

My International Engagement and Friendship

When I turned ten, I moved from South Korea, a predominantly monoracial country to Singapore, one of the most multiracial countries in the world. It was a struggle to adapt to an environment so different from my own but I was presented with an endless...

Trying to find an excellent essay sample but no results?

Don’t waste your time and get a professional writer to help!