Kyung-Sook Shin exploded onto the American literary scene in 2011 with her novel “Please Look After Mom.” The English-language debut, which explores themes around motherhood, sacrifice and identity, went on to win the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, making Shin the first woman and first South Korean to ever win it. Shin, who was born in the countryside and finished high school in the evenings while working as an electronics factory worker, is now one of South Korea’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Over the course of three decades, Shin’s novels have won nearly every major Korean literary prize.

Her newest novel to be published in English, “The Court Dancer,” tells the story of a late 19th century Korean peasant woman, Yi Jin, whose life becomes extraordinary as Korea’s Joseon Dynasty struggles to manage colonial incursions from Europe, the United States, and Japan.

A few weeks before its American release, I traveled to Seoul to speak with the book’s English language translator, PEN Translates grant awardee Anton Hur. (Since our conversation, Hur has been selected to translate another one of Shin’s books, forthcoming in English as “Violets.”) During our visit we spoke about gender, colonialism, and race in a South Korea that is increasingly a major player on the global cultural stage.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: What should potential readers know about “The Court Dancer?”

Anton Hur: It’s a historical novel about a court dancer coming from one world to another in a quite literal sense, in that she's going from Korea to France. She’s also moving from the traditional Korean way, where women had certain roles that they had to fill. But she decides throughout the course of the novel that, “I'm sorry, that there are other things that I can do.” Even though it’s historical, “The Court Dancer" is written in a very modern style and deals with a lot of modern social issues. One of the interesting things that she does which was not really highlighted by Korean critics, for example, is how she cross-dresses at the end of the novel!

CPW: Yes, she does, and Shin does not make a big deal out of this. It just happens in the book, twice.

AH: She dresses as a man in order to [travel] around Korea, and what’s interesting for a contemporary audience is that it’s something you see fairly frequently in Korean historical dramas. Maybe it was a thing that women used to do in order to move in between spheres and whatnot.

CPW: I would say it’s not unusual to see Kyung-Sook Shin write female characters who confronting what agency they do and don’t have in a patriarchal society, but this book felt as though she decided, "I'm really going to write a book about women's agency at the end of the Joseon dynasty.” In interpreting this for an English-speaking audience that may not be as familiar with the history, did you see yourself as an interpreter of Korean history as well?

AH: I did think about this a lot before I translated it, but as I was doing it, I realized Kyung-Sook Shin had already done so much work to make it accessible that there was very little for me to do. She’s a very powerful writer, and she's hard to ruin if you just follow what she's doing. There are some modifications I had to make though. For example, there are a lot of place names within the palace. Like there's this one gate called the Gate of Dualities. I translated its name into Gate of Dualities because although it's spelled out in the Korean, sometimes they have Chinese characters next to it. Kyung-Sook Shin is trying to tell you to look at the Chinese characters and see the significance[of] dualities when the characters are standing in front of it and talking. Even many Korean readers who are younger than I am will not necessarily understand this, because they never received the classical education that changed after I went out of school. For the most part it's just as exotic to [a Korean reader] as it is to an American reader or a British reader.



CPW: I'm hesitant to call “The Court Dancer” a feminist work because I don’t know if that’s what Shin would say. What it called to mind for me was the similar way that Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë’s works attempted to tell us something about the agency that women had in their lives, and how colonialism can impact the lives of women both at home and abroad. How did you approach this translation as a man, knowing that you would be intervening in this discourse of possibly sensitive gendered content?

Kyung-Sook Shin’s a very powerful writer, and she's hard to ruin if you just follow what she's doing.

AH: Even though I am gay and out, I’m still a cisgender man. The thing about being a man as opposed to being, for example, a gay woman or any other kind of minority is that you can pretend you're not gay and people [often] assume you're not gay when they meet, so you can disappear into your closet very easily. I was a bit greedy in wanting to translate it. I've lived overseas, and I've been a stranger in a strange land; I strongly identified with the main character, Yi Jin, for this reason. I'm a big Francophile as well, so I could get the French references. I [also] read the French translation, which came out years before the English. I felt like I was very qualified to do this and I was a huge fan of Kyung-Sook Shin.

And women will have the answer: Did I do a good enough job? Am I capable of doing that job? They are in a position to answer that. I do care if feminists criticize my work, but I think that I just really wanted to do this book because it spoke to me so much.

CPW: It’s interesting that a woman translator didn’t pick it up earlier. Is it that there aren't many women working in literary translation in Korea? Why you and not somebody else?

AH: Most of the translators of Korean literature are women, so I think it was luck really. I was just the first person who was passionate enough about the book to make the case for it, even though I did samples for two of her other works as well. I asked if I could do this one too.

CPW: How did you approach the act of translation? Word for word, then editing?

AH: So what I do is — should I go public with this? Because I may never get another translation job if I say this but I don't actually read the entire work from beginning to end before I translate something. Although for this book I did, because I read it when it first came out in Korea. That was a long time ago, so I didn't remember all the little details that happened in the book. I want to sort of discover it again as I translate it. Then it’s more fun. A crucial part of this process is that I do it from beginning to end. I do translate every word.

Women will have the answer: Did I do a good enough job? Am I capable of doing that job? They are in a position to answer that.

CPW: The visual experience is different in moving from one language to the other though.

AH: The Korean looks very different on the page than in English. My mentor, who read drafts, told me, “There are certain things you don't need to carry over. Do it the way you know Virginia Woolf does it.”

CPW: I like Virginia Woolf as a reference point because I think she tackled similar themes. “Mrs. Dalloway” has a series of examples of women who are straining against social boundaries. Similarly, “The Court Dancer” is, like Woolf’s writing, a visually lush experience. It’s very cinematic. Was that hard to translate?

AH: I wish it was so that I have something to tell you, but it was just so easy to translate. I can't quite crack how she does it, but she doesn't tell you everything. For example, instead of telling you what’s on a tunic she’ll say something like, "Oh, this is the way it moved, and this is the way [the tip of] a tassel was moving. Then you have the entire picture in your head.” As the translator, all I had to do was follow her lead and do exactly what she was doing.

There's a sex scene in the beginning [with a description of how] they're making love and then the aphorism ‘The four hooves of a running horse never touch the ground.’ My husband read that and said, "What?" But it tells you exactly what their lovemaking was like. How could you not get it?

The thing about this book perhaps I should tell you, from a formatting standpoint, is that it was [first published] serialized in a newspaper. I think its cinematic because she had to give it to the newspaper in parts, like a TV serialization.

CPW: Are you trying to help non-Korean readers feel the novel the way that Koreans will feel it or are you trying to get at something deeper thematically?

AH: Every time I translate a sentence, any sentence in any book, the first thing I look at is the order of the images in the sentence. I ask myself if this is significant if this is worth preserving. That is the first thing that I look at.

CPW: As a black American, I was thrilled to see her touch on my own diasporic history. Shin mentions the massacre of Lakota people after the murder of Sitting Bull, while also explicitly describing the dehumanization of African slaves on French soil. I told my husband, “Wow, she didn’t need to do that. But she really wanted to hit the point home to Europeans.”

AH: Yes. There are parts where I was like, "[Should] I translate this as is?” because it’s a lot. I wondered also: are these stories about black and Native American people hers to tell? Is it my story to tell as a translator?

CPW: Was this book a typical Korean reader’s first encounter with details about what colonialism did to Africans?

AH: Probably.

I wondered also: are these stories about black and Native American people hers to tell?

CPW: Americans, especially, are paying a lot of attention to Korean pop culture right now, including Korean literature. Did you feel like there was a particular spotlight on you in a way that maybe there wouldn't have been 10 years ago when this book came out?

AH: The biggest emotion I feel when I think about non-Korean readership of Korean literature is overwhelming gratitude. My second emotion about it is that I feel obligated to the writers that I translate because I feel like they really trust you with their work, and for me that trust is very moving.

CPW: Finally, at one point Shin writes, “What kind of life could such a clever Korean girl look forward to?” The whole story seems to be her answer: This is the kind of life that kind of like messy life that a clever girl like Yi Jin can look forward to in a patriarchal society.

AH: And I know so many Korean women like her. Something like less than 5 percent of executives in [South] Korea are women. We have the highest number of violent crimes committed against women per capita. There's a lot of gender inequality in [South] Korea, and yet all the really talented Koreans who are internationally known are women. Like Yuna Kim, the figure skater, is a woman. Han Kang, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel "The Vegetarian," is a woman. Kyung-Sook Shin is a woman — and not only is she a God of Korean literature, she is The God of Korean Literature.



This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io