Monthly Archives: June 2011

List Summer 2011: New Trends in Modern Korean Fiction

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The Summer 2011 issue of LTI Korea’s quarterly publication, List, is available now in print and online.

This issue is chock full of writers and titles worth checking out, including…

an excerpt from a translation I’ve been working on!

From Ashes and Red, by Pyun Hye-young.

There’s also an excerpt from Park Min-gyu’s Pavane for a Dead Princess, translated by Krys Lee.

The magazine also contains interviews with both of these writers.

And there is a longer excerpt from Kim Ae-ran’s short story, Mouthwatering, translated by H. Jamie Chang. Kim Ae-ran’s first novel, 두근두근 내 인생, was just released by Changbi.

The Summer 2011 issue of List (all of which is available online) is packed with book reviews to help you plan your summer reading. Definitely take a look.

LAND by Pak Kyung-ni reviewed by Margaret Drabble – TLS

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Margaret Drabble, DBE and author of The Red Queen (a novel based on The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, the Crown Princess and wife of Prince Sado of the crazy) has reviewed the new printing of the Agnita Tennant translation of Park Kyong-ni’s roman fleuve  The Land (토지).  Spoiler alert: she liked it.

LAND by Pak Kyung-ni reviewed by Margaret Drabble – TLS.

This magnum opus is a particular fave of Koreans of a certain age (my parents, including my dad who reads nothing but lervs dramas), and I’m very glad to see this partial translation (It’s part 1 of 16 or 21 volumes in Korean, depending on the edition) getting some mainstream press.

Random sidenote: I had a chance to meet her a couple years ago on a trip to her home, but she passed away two days before the scheduled trip. Sad.

Here’s a Korean Studies review of it from the first printing.

From the Bureau of squid: more fun with Google Translate

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, but lunch looked pretty good today at husband’s office cafeteria:

I’m surprised GT came up with “prison” for 콩밥 (rice with beans) because it’s a euphemism for “serving time,” but I would not be surprised to find an actual Bureau of Squid somewhere nearby, and am very concerned about the Jeyuk crisis simmered Night, which is how I’ve been feeling in this hothothot Seoul summer. I have no words for eggs and vegetables, though.

The romanization of the untranslated words, however, is curious. I wonder if “it” is translating the words based on prior examples of romanized Korean words, or if it has an algorithm for romanizing words it can’t translate? If the former, it says a lot about the approach taken towards translating words for Korean foods or objects that don’t have counterparts in the target languages. Translators, how often do you romanize instead of trying to translate? This is not a value judgement. I think there are pros and cons to both methods, and the words ultimately sound foreign whether translated or romanized precisely because they don’t have easy correlates.

The question of whether to translate descriptively or to introduce the native term is often a tough call in the name of readability and pedagogy, especially when introducing new objects or concepts. “Tofu,” is part of the English lexicon now, but I imagine it was initially introduced as “Japanese bean curd.” I have seen “bean curd” used in translations of Asian literature as well as in original work in English dealing with Asia, but at this point the foodstuff is ubiquitous in the U.S., and is in English language dictionaries (both the American Heritage and the OED cite 1880 as the first English usage of “tofu”). The food item appears on menus in Korean and Chinese restaurants alternately as bean curd and tofu, but rarely as “doobu” or “doufu,” their counterparts. The same can be said for a number of Chinese and Japanese words that have become naturalized in the English lexicon, but have cognates in other Asian languages: futon, Zen, congee, mochi, feng shui, to name a few. Of course, this has to do with when and how the items and concepts were introduced to the target language (English) and how they were popularized. The U.S. government (military) had a vested interest in promoting (or rehabilitating, as one scholar I know is currently researching) Japanese culture after WWII, and the media coverage of the new Japan introduced these items and concepts to the American public and language (just do a search on “Japanese culture” in Time magazine between 1945 and 1970 for a quick glance at the changing perceptions of Japan, Asia, and the introduction of Japanese aesthetics and culture, like this article covering an exhibition of Ukiyoe at Chicago’s Art Institute in 1955 — note the title “Out of the Floating World,” which already suggests some familiarity with Japanese art).

But I digress.  Seriously.

An alarming number of translations of Korean children’s books (well, three that I’ve seen but that’s already alarming to me) use “corn cakes” for 떡 (ttuk), for what reason I can’t imagine, since it’s made with rice flour, but I assume the translators thought there was some folk correlation between corn cakes and ttuk. I find this to be a disservice to the reader because it makes false analogies between cultures, but I understand the difficulty, especially in children’s books, of conveying the right nuance in your translation. So…once again, translating is hard and there’s no one way to do it. Is that my conclusion to every post on translation?  Sheesh.

Now, off to find that surrey prison. Tracking down a moving target is always hard.

Hallyu on Hulu

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So, I’m back after a malaise-induced hiatus to bring you this (initially via the Korean Studies Listserv):

Korean TV dramas find new fans, outlets with online video – Chicago Tribune.

Korean drama portal Dramafever has partnered with Hulu, and now you can find 50 Korean dramas with English subtitles on said Hulu.  As far as I can tell, it’s the first non-English language (they have some British comedy) content on the site (please correct me if I’m wrong — I’m no Hulu expert).

Korean drama on the menu

Last month, one of the co-founders of Dramafever posted to the comment section of Wesley Yang’s “Paper Tigers” article inNew York Magazine to defend it, but also refute the stereotype of the Asian American male experience in the article with his own:

I am an Asian American male from a fairly humble background, and though I attended Stuyvesant, I never excelled academically and graduated from a so-so college with mediocre grades. However, I did much better in corporate America and rose up to become the youngest senior level executive in a fairly large business that probably wouldn’t win any diversity awards. I’m neither a Twinkie (most of my friends are Asian) nor the stereotypical tech guy (I was head of marketing). My experience is that being an Asian American becomes a handicap only if you mentally turn it into one.  

But I was more interested in what he said about his own site and its users:

I quit that job not because I hit the bamboo ceiling but because I was bored and wanted to start my own company. I co-founded a company called DramaFever (www.dramafever.com) partly because, well as an Asian American, I thought it’d be nice to have Asian pop culture become a bigger part of the American mainstream. We’re streaming popular Asian TV shows and movies as they aired in Asia but with English subtitles. To our surprise, a significant majority of our 700,000 and rapidly growing user base isn’t even Asian but white, black, and Hispanic. When we interview many of our non-Asian users, most of them tell us they stumbled onto Asian stuff accidentally and found it fascinating and interesting. In fact, they find it more weird that our questioning seem to suggest that there is anything unnatural about ordinary Americans digging Asian stuff!  

When I did jury duty in New York back in 2005, one of my fellow jurors asked me if I had ever watched “that Korean show about the ancient palace chef” (Daejanggum) on TV, and that he and his wife were addicted to it. He was white, and his wife was Chinese, and he told me they watched it together and separately with English and Chinese subtitles, respectively (at that time, “Jewel of the Palace,” as it was called, was being broadcast on a Chinese language channel and AZN in New York).

A quick look at some of  the commentary on other Korean drama portals (d-addicts, mysoju, dramabeans, etc.) shows an extremely broad range of k-drama fans from all over the world, united by their love of treacle and cheese (ha…I kid b/c I love… most of it in spite of myself). I’m interested in this on several levels: despite the Korean government’s promotion of the so-called Korean Wave (hallyu) and efforts to have Korean programs broadcast in other countries, private, often fan-generated websites seem to be the primary source of Korean dramas for non-Korean international audiences. The subtitling for the dramas shown on these sites is done by the site users and fans themselves, and is sometimes much better than the subtitles I’ve seen for big-budget Korean films, which, to this translator bespeaks the need for a close affinity with the source material, or even more basically, someone who is actually interested in conveying the content and sentiment of the original text. Re: dramafever, it’s up there with the AZN cable television network as nodes of Asian American identity that don’t wallow in nationalist earnestness or selective in-group mentality.

I was at a workshop last year where someone gave a paper on the cyberspace subcultures devoted to Korean drama that discussed the different ways in which users were accessing Korean drama online: not only by watching subtitled streaming videos, but through mediated plot summaries, discussion, and still images. I can’t go too far into this because there’s a big “Please do not distribute without permission” at the top of the paper, but I was intrigued by this idea of a sort of bricolage narrative approach to Korean drama, and curious about how that effects the imaginary of the spaces and society portrayed in the drama world. I mean, this is based on the assumption that we all know that they don’t portray the *real* Korea, but then again, plenty of people thought it was possible to have a crap job and live in a giant West Village loft because of Friends.

I’m very interested to see how this new Hulu offering will be received, as I figure out how to find out about that kind of info. Heh. In the meantime, I’ll start catching up on Kdrama again after being overwhelmed by the options in my Korean on-demand cable.

Does Asian America Need a Brand Makeover?

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If you get annoyed by orientalist cover art on novels by Asian American writers, if you don’t like the predictable range of roles that Asian actors and actresses are allowed to play, if you think there should be more quality Asian American films (as well as a channel through which you can access a community of moviegoers to share opinions about such films), you might find Jeff Yang’s ideas in the San Francisco Chronicle interesting.

His piece starts out as a review of Hangover 2. Basically, Yang hated the movie (in spite of the fact he found the first one enjoyable) and goes through all the egregious stereotypes in case you missed them: “Thuggish gangsters. Wizened monks. Lascivious ladyboys. Not to mention whiz-kid pre-meds, infinitely forgiving lotus-blossom brides and the Father of All Tiger Dads.” I swear I think even Bradley Cooper was wincing at himself as he delivered the line, “Not big breasts on her but a solid rack for an Asian” (for which — not the sympathetic wincing, but the line – Kate Muir of The Times docked the film a star).

Why can’t talented people like Ken Jeong find work in better films? Yang brings up Ang Lee and Justin Lin as examples of directors who have made profitable Asian American films. But now they direct features geared towards more mainstream audiences. Why? According to certain insiders, the industry’s current situation is such that, from an financial vantage point, you would have to be “retarded” to be making Asian American films.

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Dispatches from the 11th Seoul LGBT Film Festival

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This weekend I managed to carve out a little time to take in some movies at the queer film festival. I was able to see a couple of foreign films and a bunch of Korean ones. I’ll give some brief thoughts below, but first, the festival runs until Wednesday at the Seoul Art Cinema in the Nagwon Arcade next to Insa-dong. Tickets are available for purchase online or at the box office.

So, film festivals. I’m trying to think of a good analogy for how film festival marathons make me feel, but so far all I’ve come up with is transoceanic flights. They’re exciting at first because you think you’re going to be transported somewhere really new and different, but several hours into it, you’re sitting there in the dark, your butt aching and the backs of your legs numb from those stupid chairs (is it the fabric? it feels like it’s the fabric that’s causing me pain), and you’re whispering into your cupped hands for it to just end already. And the more often you buy those tickets, the harder it is to make it to the end.

This time around, it wasn’t until hour five of my film marathon that I started to enjoy myself.

The first film I saw would probably be really, really interesting to someone who is either new to lesbianism or new to lesbian films. Being new to neither, I have to admit that I got really bored. I don’t actually want to bash the film since I think they did an okay job (and just needed to do some more editing), so I’ll speak in broad strokes. But basically, when did lesbianism turn into one nonstop dialogue about wanting to make babies? Not all of us want babies. Some of us just want to watch movies about cool lesbians doing cool things in cool cities and towns around the world. Please, please someone make another movie quick that isn’t about babies. My other complaint about the movie was that it was too openly didactic. The first scene is set in a bar… but it’s a scene of women talking about heteronormative gender roles and bi-phobia. *Yawn* It’s a movie. Show me. Don’t tell me. On the plus side, the movie does open up a dialogue about adoption rights and support for single mothers. Given that the movie is set in Hong Kong, that felt like a fresh perspective on the issue, especially considering how stereotyped Asians are when it comes to adoption and single parenting.

The second film I saw was “창피해” (“Ashamed”), which got a lot of hype at the women’s film festival and has been promoted online. It’s supposed to be the first feature-length “lesbian film” in Korea featuring 김꽃비 (Kim Kkobbi) and 김효진  (Kim Hyojin), who are not queer.

I wanted to like this film. I even got up early in order to get to the box office when it opened so I could get a ticket. So how can I explain…? Let me put it this way. When not only the director himself (yes, HIMself) repeatedly refers to his own movie as “boring,” but even the MC who is facilitating the Q&A after the movie refers to it as boring, you know something’s wrong.

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Ask Not What Korea Can Do For Mini Han…

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In today’s edition of OhmyNews.com, Michael Hurt (from “Scribblings of the Metropolitician“) contributed an excellent piece (titled “‘Korean Beauty’ Wins International Competition Only To Be Cast Aside By Korea”) on Mini Han (한민희), who won the 2010 Miss Internaional Queen pageant. He uses the pageant to raise awareness about the still widely held attitude of prejudice and fear regarding non-heteronormative sexual identity in Korea.

Some might say more Korean celebrities have been “coming out” of the proverbial closet in the recent years. Publicly visible figures such as Hong Suk Chun (홍석천)  and  Harisu (하리수) are important in that they bring human faces to what is generally decried in abstraction as a radical social taboo — even a mental disease. Yet their token presence should not be understood as a sign of that the society has become meaningfully tolerant. For example, Hurt claims that Harisu, by being more rigorously feminine than most women, serves to reinforce existing gender constructions and does not call into question deeply ingrained attitudes about gender and identity.

Hurt calls out the Korean media for its opportunistic celebration of achievement by Koreans in golf, football, ice skating (or for that matter, business, politics, art, scholarship — anything that should bring Koreans national pride). He singles out the national hysteria over half-Korean Hines Ward, who was named the MVP of Super Bowl XL. But rather than merely criticize the hypocrisy of this kind of idolization, Hurt emphasizes how this provided a productive moment for race relations in Korea — a rare opportunity for the marginalized (in this case, mixed children of American G.I.’s) to share their experiences at the national level, to reapappropriate the media’s disingenuous opportunism and push the spectacle towards a socially progressive moment of dialogue and reflection. Continue reading →