VOICES Program

South Korea was the featured country in this year's annual Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, a preview of what's up next for global publishers. But as Bruce Fulton, the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia and Youngmin Kwon, professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University, know only too well, the current international attention wasn't always so easy to come by. The pair spoke in a VOICES program about the process through which Korean letters, and their own recently released anthology, Modern Korean Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2005), came to be known to the outside world. Kwon set the scene by recounting his first experience teaching Korean literature at Harvard 20 years ago. Two students showed up for the class, he said, and the second student was the first student's girlfriend. This disappointing experience led him to realize the great importance of making Korean literature more accessible in English translation. After returning to Seoul, Kwon made the decision to enlist Bruce Fulton, who was one of his graduate students at Seoul National University, as his collaborator in this effort. Their collaboration eventually led to the publication of Modern Korean Fiction. Kwon went on to describe how this seminal work was designed to be comprehensive. It includes pieces written from the 1920s through the 1990s; works from male and female writers; works from writers who wanted their writing to address the burning questions of their day, and those who wanted their writing to be timeless. Space in the book was reserved for fiction by North Korean writers as well, much of which previously had been banned in South Korea. Following this introduction, the program continued with two bilingual readings from the anthology. The first, a story about a group of North Korean laborers, driven to Pusan by the war, nostalgic and guilt-riven by memories of home, is typical of mid-century Korean fiction, which focused on the sense of mournful division that pervaded the country. The second, titled "Lizard", was read by its author Kim Yongha. This story typifies what Kwon says are the sensibilities of contemporary South Korean writers: the plots are fast-moving and the characters are young, urban residents of Seoul.

About the Speakers

Bruce Fulton is the inaugural occupant of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia’s Asian studies department. Fulton has co-translated several anthologies of modern Korean short fiction in addition to Modern Korean Fiction; edited the Korea sections of the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (2002) and the Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (2003) and is general editor of the Modern Korean Fiction series published by the University of Hawaii Press. He is co-recipient of several translation awards and grants, including the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship given for a translation from Korean.

Youngmin Kwon is a professor of Korean literature at Seoul National University and former dean of the College of Humanities there. He has written and edited numerous volumes of literary history, literary criticism and reference works on modern Korean literature, as well as the CD-ROM 100 Years of Modern Korean Literature. He is a former editor of the journal Munhak sasang (“Literature and Thought”) and current president of the International Association of Comparative Korean Studies. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley and has conducted research in the U.S. and Japan.