Heinz Insu Fenkl, the translator of this week’s story, “An Anonymous Island,” by the Korean writer Yi Mun-yol, talks to Cressida Leyshon, a fiction editor at the magazine.

_“An Anonymous Island” is set in an isolated village in the mountains, where the narrator is taking up her first post as a teacher. Yi is one of South Korea’s most prominent contemporary writers and has been publishing fiction since 1979. Some of his work is available in English, most notably his novels “Our Twisted Hero” and “The Poet,” but many of his novels and stories have not yet been translated into English. How typical is “An Anonymous Island” of his writing?

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Korean critics often focus on the erudition and the seriousness of the themes in Yi’s work, so in that sense, “An Anonymous Island” would be a typical Yi Mun-yol story for its critique of Confucian propriety.

As a translator, I’ve had to examine his work very intimately, from the “inside,” and I would say the story is typical of Yi’s work for a different reason. Yi uses a recurring structural device, the layering of his own persona with an incongruous first person narrator, which “An Anonymous Island” follows. Even when his narrator’s language seems very accessible and informal, his stories tend to contain many layers of meaning in his word choice and imagery. This is certainly true of “An Anonymous Island,” and it is one of the things that makes Yi particularly engaging and challenging to translate.

_Could you give an example of the layers of meaning in the original Korean text?

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One of the literary devices Yi uses, a technique characteristic of classical Korean literature, is what I call the “physiognomy of names.” Korean is written in the Korean alphabet as well as in Chinese characters, and there is a lot of wordplay that emerges from the use of homophones (words that sound the same when written in the Korean alphabet but have different meanings when written in the Chinese character). Ggaecheol, one of the central characters, has a distinct name, which the narrator ironically calls “a childish nickname.”

Ggae, the first syllable of Ggaecheol’s name, is the name of the perilla plant, which has edible leaves. The plant itself is very invasive, reseeding itself and growing like a weed once it’s planted. It comes back, year after year, and proliferates. Ggae is also the word for sesame seeds. When ggae is used as a verb, it means to wake up, to become sober, or to break something. Cheol, the second syllable, can mean iron, or steel, or season, or a time of year. It can also be read as “clear water.”

Given his role in the story as an invasive presence that literally fertilizes the women with his “seed,” you can see the layers of symbolic meaning in his name based on Korean wordplay.

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At the very beginning of the story, the narrator’s husband talks about seeing one’s face reflected in clear water. When the narrator first notices him, it is because of a strange “light” that comes from his eyes.

At the end of the story, Ggaecheol is compared to an emperor. This is where the Chinese character wordplay becomes more prominent. In Korean, the word for emperor is hwangje, made up of the two word/syllables hwang and je.

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You can see the overlap between Ggaecheol’s name and the title of emperor and how those overlapping associations relate to qualities embodied by Ggaecheol in the story. Hwangje also happens to sound like hwang jae (jae meaning “ash”). So hwangje sounds like “yellow ash,” an image very similar to that of ground sesame seeds, which look like a golden yellow powder. These are only some of the more prominent associations between the name Ggaecheol and the word for “emperor.” But looking at them closely shows how Yi reinforces a surprising range of the story’s major themes through his use of these four common words.

_In “An Anonymous Island,” the narrator’s position as an outsider is central to the narrative. As the story unfolds her curiosity is provoked by the only other outsider, Ggaecheol, a vagrant who drifted into the village years ago. How significant is this perspective in Yi’s work? How familiar would most of Yi’s Korean readers be with the way of life in such a village?

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The “outsider” or the “wanderer” is one of Yi’s favorite themes. That figure is an archetype in Korean literature (often romanticized), but Yi handles it with special authenticity and poignancy because he has had to live that role for much of his life. As you know, he was a kind of pariah because of what his father had done.

Older Korean readers would be quite familiar with the way of life in an isolated Korean village like the one in “An Anonymous Island,” some of it from first-hand experience. Contemporary readers would have an “idea” of that way of life, but largely through television and film representations, which are full of stereotypes. So the story would be somewhat shocking to both generations, but in very different ways.

_Yi was born in Seoul, in 1948, one of five children. In 1950, his father defected to the North during the Korean War, abandoning the family. What impact did that have on Yi as a child? How palpable are those divisions—both of the country and of his family—in his fiction?

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The themes of division, estrangement, and the search for connection permeates quite a lot of Yi’s work, as you can imagine. Yi had to endure the stigma of his father’s defection to the North for most of his life. It had a profound effect on his childhood, his sense of identity, and even on his later academic career. The spectre of the Korean War has never gone away in South Korea.

Yi wrote a short novel that directly addresses the theme of division: “Meeting with My Brother” [also known as “An Appointment with My Brother”], in which the narrator arranges a meeting with his North Korean half brother (whom he has never met) shortly after he learns of his father’s death in the North.

For my new translation of “Meeting with My Brother,” Yi added a short vignette that dramatizes how his father abandoned the family at the outset of the Korean War, and though it is somewhat fictionalized, it is one of the most poignant scenes in his entire body of work. “Meeting with My Brother” is one of the best descriptions of the contemporary political and social dynamics between North and South Korea. Millions of Korean families are still separated by the War (which has never technically ended) and many of the survivors are now quite elderly.

That division is a profound national trauma that is still felt quite viscerally by the generations that remember the war first-hand. I grew up in Korea in the nineteen-sixties, and every single family I knew had either been separated by the war or had lost close relatives who had died through military action or through the ordeal of living as refugees. Many of the older Koreans (like my mother, who is now eighty) are like military veterans. As they grow older, they dwell more and more on their memories of the war years.