A Stab at Korean Literature

Luckily for me, Charles Montgomery introduced me to the Portable Library of Korean Literature - a collection of short translated works by modern Korean authors. He even loaned me a bunch of books. These, together with a few I bought, are all short, so I started reading - well, skimming - them all.

The books were often interesting reads, but they often were a bit mystifying too. So many stories seemed symbolic - but of what? I felt I lacked the background to even guess what the writer was trying to communicate. I also felt a "sameness" about so many of the works; the themes, the plots, the characters, the style, the use of language all seemed repetitive. Being unable to discriminate, I was clearly missing a great deal!

So I'm going back and reading some of them more carefully. Acknowledging I lack the background to actually understand these books, I'm going to comment simply on how the books affected me.

First work: The Wings (or Wings) by Yi Sang.

I'm already troubled by problems of translation. Should the title be Wings, or should it be The Wings? (It's variously translated as either.) It makes a difference in English.

Soon the story reveals itself as a whole lot of often surrealistically-unrelated sentences - basically, a puzzle to try to figure out. But to figure out a puzzle, the clues (ie the words) have to be really clear. On page 1 we get this:

"I again plan a life with a woman. I am a spiritual straggler who has been, so to speak, after a momentary peep at crystalized intellectualism, alienated from the strategies of love."

(Hey, does that sentence make anybody want to read the book??)

But I find elsewhere a different translation:

"Again, with a woman, I draw up a plan of life, a scheme of one whose spirit has gone mad after a glimpse of the ultimate reason, a man whose lovemaking technique has grown awkward."

(At least now we know "strategies of love" refers (apparently) to sex - so maybe we do want to read it after all!)

Just contemplating the the different possible meanings in these two translations could take a year !

OK, translation is always a problem. So let's forget it, and assume every word is as Yi Sang intended.

Actually, there are 3 stories in the book. All have a similar narrator - an alienated, maladjusted, confused, powerless, sickly - but imaginative (!) - protagonist who tries to make sense of the incomprehensible world around him. In each story he has a young "wife" whose main quality seems to be that she has sexual relationships with other men, usually for money, and all the "action" of the stories centers around dealing with this situation. Repeated themes or images that struck me in all the stories are the elusive passage of time and memories, the contrast of day and night, deception, hunger and fatigue, not understanding the world before one's eyes - even having/shaving facial hair! (Examining the references to facial hair in the different stories could make a nice student essay). In all, the narrator seems Hamlet-like, trying to figure out what he should or shouldn't do to deal with the deception around him, but ultimately ineffective, powerless. His imminent death - whether through disease or self-destruction - seems to lurk nearby in all the stories.

SPOILER warning.

All the endings of the stories touched me.

The Wings ends with a seemingly simple poem, simple cry for freedom:

"I stopped my pace and wanted to shout.

Wings, spread out again!

Fly! Fly! Fly! Let me fly once more.

Let me fly just once more."

When did he "fly" before? Not clear. But in the penultimate paragraph he describes his "wings" as "the deleted phantasms of hope and ambition" that "flashed in my mind like the flipping pages of a pocket dictionary." That image - all those words tossed out of the dictionary and thrown on the "sheet of white paper" that "opens in my head" on the first page of the story - maybe he just wants the white sheet again, the creative possibilities where, even though "the body sways from fatigue" (and so he may soon die), "the soul sparkle(s) like a new, shiny coin" (ah, the money symbol, with all its hope and promise).

The end of the second story specifically refers to the grand theme of deception:

"It is but a dream to deceive,

But so too is being deceived,

Twisting, turning, wandering life,

Set fire to your shadowy heart-"

For me, a searing, haunting final line.

At the end of the last story, he is presented with a knife and choices (ah, Hamlet):

He can kill someone in revenge (presumably to repay deception)

He can kill himself and get out of it all.

Or...

He can use the knife to peel an ordinary round, lukewarm tangerine, and just go on. As he anticipates the taste of the tangerine, "tears like the vaporous steam forming on a cooling glass well up in my eyes." Wow - hot tears on cold eyes. Fire on a shadowy heart. Night and day. Passion and alienation. Truth and deception. Unbearable. Irreconcilable. Such is our existence.

Yi Sang lived and died (at the age of 27) during the Japanese occupation of Korea, during which he was imprisoned and presumably mistreated for "thought crimes." Supposedly much of the content of the stories is autobiographical, including the descriptions of poverty and ill health and a woman in his life similar to the one(s) in the stories. A sad, short life - but filled with creative passion and a gift of reading for later generations.

I may have totally misunderstood this book, whether because of the translation or my ignorance of the context in which it was written, but I had a good time searching for its meaning for me.