I first started translating Lee Chang-dong late in the summer of 1984, a few days after I arrived in Seoul to begin my Fulbright fellowship at a time when terms like “Hallyu” and “K-Wave” didn’t yet exist. I had read a short story by Lee the previous year in a literary journal that came free of charge with the Korean women’s magazine my mother often bought at the local Korean market in Marina, California. I still have those first several pages of translation notes neatly printed in technical pen, dated September 3.
What struck me about the story—and I remember this very clearly—was how its imagery seemed to transcend the words that conveyed it. There was a visceral quality to the scenes that outlasted my memory of the words. I held the images of that story in my mind permanently—like the memory of a good film.
When I first saw the film Oasis in 2004, I felt an immediate familiarity. It was as if the camera were my own consciousness playing memories back at me. In the opening scenes, when Jong-du, freezing in his Hawaiian shirt, does something as simple as eat the brick of tofu (a traditional ritual after release from prison), I felt tears well up in my eyes. He was just like a cousin of mine. The particulars of the world he lived in—down to specific camera angles—were those I remembered from my own life, and the use of illumination—from the mundane scenes to the fantasy sequences—also felt oddly familiar to me. I did not realize that Lee Chang-dong was the director until I watched the DVD for the second time.
Even as it generated a great deal of controversy after its release in 2002, Oasis won numerous international awards. Lee had established himself as a significant force in the world of film, a director whom many now consider Korea’s best. I think that for Koreans, Oasis was, in an ironic way, too familiar, too close to home. It was a brutally realistic depiction of a part of Korean society that many found embarrassing and dissonant. But for those who stayed with it, Oasis also offered a kind of transcendent release by its conclusion. This was not only due to the power of its characterizations and the underlying moral consciousness; much of the film’s force came from the technique behind its cinematography, which I found to be already present back in the early 1980s in the language of Lee’s short stories.
Recently, I dug up my old translation notes and the original text once again. The magazine itself was badly yellowed, the cheap paper having decomposed and gone brittle in the intervening forty years. I found the story and the author interview, and there he was, Lee Chang-dong, looking oddly feral in his puffy coat, posed in front of a painting of tigers, looking more like a future political prisoner than a future auteur. I remembered that when I went to my first meeting with an official at the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, ready with the list of writers I wanted to translate during my Fulbright, he had crossed out most of them with a terse remark that my fellowship would be rescinded if I worked on any of them. (One of the writers on that list would later be imprisoned.) I thought it better not to show that official my initial attempt at translating a story by Lee.
I grew up in Korea in the 1960s and early 1970s under the regime of the dictator Park Chung Hee, and I lived there once again for a year in the mid-1980s during the volatile period that followed the Gwangju massacre, while another military dictator, Chun Doo-Hwan, was still very much in power. Now, as a professor who teaches both literature and creative writing, I find myself having to remind my students that in many places, literary writing is still an endeavor with potentially life-threatening consequences. Until very recently, that was the case for serious writers in Korea, who risked prison sentences for themselves, their relatives, their editors, and their publishers. The stories in this volume come from experiences that most Americans will neither have to endure, see, nor hear about in our new bubble of digital isolationism. They are masterful, deeply felt, and come to us when we are experiencing our own volatile times.
If Hallyu is the Korean Wave, then the stories in this collection are the ocean from which that wave emerges. It is the ocean of history, its depths full of tragedy, oppression, hope, and redemption—all the uncomfortable reality that made Korea’s current global economic and cultural power possible. To write about it involved great personal risk and vulnerability.
When asked about his short stories, Lee once said, “I always wrote for one person, for this person who thought and felt the same way as I do. It almost felt like I was writing a love letter to this very specific person who would understand what I’m writing and share the same feelings and thoughts.” My fellow translator, Yoosup Chang, and I have received that letter in our hearts, and I hope that you will, too.
Heinz Insu Fenkl