I’ll leave the close-reading of this story’s interrogation of capitalist desire – a theme in virtually every story in this book – to the aforementioned Marxist windbags. Meanwhile, my own totally bourgeois sensibilities were focused on the oddly seductive language of things that pervaded that story, the act of revelling in these objects – fluffy yarn, gold fillings, furs, linen textiles as light as dragonfly wings – and outwardly condemning them at the same time.
Other stories feature lush natural descriptions, virile male body hair and muscles, ghosts, ominous medical equipment, and straw woven into rope and sandals. Kang’s language is highly tactile in a way that I’ve arguably failed to really convey into English (Korean is much richer in onomatopoeia than English is, sorry!), and to me it is clear that Kang is enjoying her talent at making objects appear at the tip of her pen, enjoying the pleasure of creating a tableau of words.
It’s not just actual objects that are depicted as objects; the thoughts and emotions of her characters are as concrete as any treasured parasol. The emotions in her stories physically move, have textures, temperatures, and are indicated with corporeal markers more than abstractions (I quickly ran out of different ways to describe tears welling and bursting). Her stories are so simple in plot and her endings are so perfunctory that the appeal for her in writing these sketches must have lain in characterization and description.
And, of course, in the constant urging to wake up, smell the class struggle, and do something about it: ‘Why do you let other people push you around!’
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Special thanks to Anthony and Taylor at Honford Star for their vision and hard work, and to English PEN for their invaluable support in the form of the PEN Translates award. Extra special thanks to all the amazing and fierce Korean women who made this translation what it is: the laser-sharp Sophie “Sohee” Bowman for her essential edits, my fantastic translation professors – Hayun Jung, Suh Ji-moon, and Sora Kim-Russell – who taught me everything I know about translation, my formidable graduate advisor Nancy Jiwon Cho who gave literature back to me, and, of course, my mother, Myoung-Sook Ham. This translation is dedicated to her.
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The stories in this volume were translated from manuscripts provided by the Korean Copyright Commission (www.copyright.or.kr), apart from ‘The Authoress’ and ‘The Underground Village’ which were translated from Gang Gyeong-ae Jeonjib (Complete Works of Kang Kyeong-ae), ed. Lee Sang-kyung (Somyeong Publishers, 1999). The translation of ‘Salt’ incorporates the originally unpublished ending as reported in Han Man-soo’s ‘Gang Gyeong-ae so-geum-ui bokja bog-won-gwa geom-yeol-u-hoe-ro-seo-oe “na-nwo-sseu-gi”’ (‘Restoration process of brush-stroke bokja/fuseji in Kang Kyeong-Ae’s “Salt” and the strategies used to avoid censorship’), published in Han-gukmunhak-yeongu (Korean Literature Research), 31, pp.169-191.
Anton Hur
Translator
The Underground Village Page 25