Lost Souls
Page 40
Hwang is both a modern and a traditional writer. He is modern in his familiarity with Freudian theory, literary modernism, and contemporary trends in both Western and East Asian literature (he read contemporary Japanese authors in Japanese and especially liked Shiga Naoya, and read authors such as Lu Xun, Ernest Hemingway, and Albert Camus in translation). He is traditional in his storytelling technique. Hwang made no secret of the debt he owed his elders, at whose feet he heard many a tale as a boy (“The Dog of Crossover Village” may have been one such story), and he acknowledged as well the veterans whose accounts inform his novel Trees on a Slope (Namu tŭl pit’al e sŏda, 1960) and his several stories that take place against the background of the Korean War.3 Among Hwang’s several narrative approaches, the one that perhaps best reflects the performance of the traditional storyteller is his use of indirect speech, utilized to especially good effect in the title story of The Pond. Also distinctive is his tendency to reserve the use of first-person narratives for the autobiographical stories, such as “My Father,” that constitute about one tenth of his short-fiction oeuvre. Finally, it should come as no surprise that Hwang was a careful writer, observing a regular schedule and not infrequently returning to a story to edit and revise for second publication (the ending of “The Dog of Crossover Village” as it was first published in March 1948, in the literary journal Kaebyŏk, differs somewhat from the ending of the story as it appears in Hwang’s Collected Works, published in the early 1980s4). The result is a bracing experience for readers who prefer their fiction short, and especially for readers of modern Korean fiction in English translation, which until very recently has tended to showcase works with compelling themes but not necessarily commensurate narrative skill.
The translators wish to thank the editors of the following, in which earlier versions of four of the stories in this volume appeared: Shadows of a Sound: Stories by Hwang Sunwŏn, published by Mercury House (“Mantis”); Asian Pacific Quarterly (“The Dog of Crossover Village”); A Man, published by Jimoondang (“The Dog of Crossover Village” and “Pibari”); and Korean Literature Today (“Deathless”).
NOTES
1. Hwang, often waggish when asked to discuss his stories, told me that he wrote this story because he liked to drink (interview with Hwang Sunwŏn, April 3, 1997).
2. Of these five stories, one, “Mountains” (San, 1956), is not included here. The translation appears in Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, rev. and exp. ed., trans. Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2007).
3. Trees on a Slope, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). See the afterword to this volume, “The War Stories of Hwang Sunwŏn.”
4. The texts used for the translations in this volume are those in The Collected Works of Hwang Sunwŏn (Hwang Sunwŏn chŏnjip) (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisŏng sa): vol. 1, The Pond (Nŭp) and Wild Geese (Kirŏgi), 1980; vol. 2, The Dog of Crossover Village (Mongnŏmi maŭl ŭi kae) and Clowns (Kogyesa), 1981; vol. 3, Cranes (Hak) and Lost Souls (Irŏbŏrin saram tŭl), 1981.