Posts by Jae Won Edward Chung

The Secret Outside Us: Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day

November 21, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Jae Won Edward Chung

The balance of the surreal, the cerebral, the melancholic, and the grotesque puts Bae’s work in league with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Today, we continue our four-part series on contemporary Korean Literature sponsored by Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Introducing our next title is scholar Jae Won Edward Chung, who last reviewed Yi Sang’s Selected Works (tr. Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney, Sawako Nakayasu, and newly annointed National Book Award winner Don Mee Choi).

The Secret Outside Us: A review of Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day (tr. Deborah Smith)

Ayami, a former actress in her late twenties, works in an audio theater, takes German lessons, and fantasizes about the birth parents she never knew. One day, she has a disturbing encounter with a man loitering outside the theater. When he insists on being let in, their hands briefly meet over the opposite sides of the glass door. Buha is an aspiring middle-aged poet who has never written a poem in his life. He obsesses over a woman poet whose photograph he once saw in a newspaper. He appears to cross paths with her in the same audio theater where Ayami works. Is Ayami the poet? Here, too, their hands overlap without touching. But something is off. The poet woman should be decades older than Ayami. And we know—or think we know—that Ayami is not a poet.

On the surface, Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day is about alienated city-dwellers stranded in their quest for connection and significance. The novel is filled with creative and intellectual types, most of whom have experienced varying degrees of failure. They discuss theories of photography and obsess about Max Ernst’s objets. Their lifestyle and banter may feel like familiar territory for some readers, but their journey is not without pathos, as we find ourselves in the thrall of the same yearning and fear that grip these artists as their lives unceremoniously pass them by. There are also scenes of levity. In the first section, we’re promised the appearance of a German poet. Seventy pages later, a detective novelist arrives instead, with hopes of taking an inspiring train ride up to Yalu River bordering China (Ayami has to remind him about North Korea).

As the introduction of this detective confirms, Bae is operating within the parameters of the postmodern noir. The balance of the surreal, the cerebral, the melancholic, and the grotesque puts Bae’s work in league with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. READ MORE…

Paranoid Wonder: A review of Yi Sang’s Selected Works

October 31, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Jae Won Edward Chung

In this second installment of a series on Korean literature, we look at an important new anthology collecting cult author Yi Sang’s work

Paranoid Wonder: A review of Yi Sang’s Selected Works (tr. Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney, and Sawako Nakayasu)

Paranoid. Labyrinthine. Uncanny. Secretive. This is how a Korean literature enthusiast might describe the works of Yi Sang (1910-1937) before words eventually fail them. They might then offer up details of his life: that Yi lived during the Japanese occupation, that he trained as an architect, that his pen name sounds like Korean for strange or ideal, that he succumbed to tuberculosis in Tokyo after a period of incarceration for the crime of being futei senjin–a “lawless Korean.” When you hear about Yi Sang for the first time, there is something intoxicating about the reverential air, the residual awe, the mourning over what might have been. Everyone mentions how he died so young.

With the release of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), English-language readers can chart their own journeys of paranoid wonder. The volume boasts over 200 pages of translated poetry, essays, and fiction, organized into four sections. Jack Jung tackles the Korean-language poems and essays; Sawako Nakayasu covers the Japanese language poetry; Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney collaborate over his fiction. But there is more to this division of labor than boundaries of language and genre. The volume includes essays from the translators, who speak in voices at once scholarly and personal, urgent and elegiac.

Selected Works acts as a sourcebook of images too, crucial for appreciating Yi Sang who was also a talented illustrator and artist. Much would be lost if we did not take into account the visual dimensions of his work, the unsettling emotions they were meant to evoke. Below are reproductions of “Crow’s Eye View” Poems No. 1 and No. 4, originally published in Chosun Central Daily in 1934:

poem1

Poem No. 1

 

For twenty-first century readers accustomed to eye-popping colors and sleek lines, the prickly black script and claustrophobic spacing may induce dread or ghoulish foreboding. Even if we can’t read the scripts in the original, we may detect lines of relentless repetition moving from right to left. We may in fact discern something presciently code-like, resembling the glittering digital rain in The Matrix. READ MORE…