-
Italian
Lemon
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Italian
Buio in sala
-
Japanese
木々、坂に立つ
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English
You Have Reached the End of the Future
-
English
Non-matter
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Russian
Пересеку время ради тебя
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Portuguese
CASTELLA
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Turkish
Cennetten Kaçan Çocuk
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Chinese
韩国经典短篇小说选
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English
Cursed Bunny
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Galician
A vexetariana
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Japanese
地球でハナだけ
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Italian
Il cuore dell’amore e del rispetto
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Japanese
ひこうき雲
WRITERS & MEDIA
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This project was launched in 2017 with the aim of expanding the foundation for the exchange of Korean literature and globalizing Korean literature by identifying and supporting Korean diaspora literature. LTI Korea has been striving to establish diaspora literature as a valuable asset of world literature through the support for multilingual translation of outstanding works of diaspora literature, production of sourcebooks on the history and current status of diaspora literature, hosting of exchange events between Korean and overseas writers, hosting of essay contests on works of overseas Korean writers, and production of digital contents related to works of diaspora literature.
EVENTS
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Spanish Article
Concurso de literatura coreana: publica tu reseña y gana grandes premios
XiahPop / JUNE 24, 2022 -
Polish Book Review
Pachinko - recenzja książki
naEKRANIE / JULY 14, 2022 -
Portuguese Article
[LISTA] 5 livros para conhecer mais sobre a história e memória da cultura sul-coreana
Revista KoreaIN / JULY 11, 2022
now i’ve found the great wall of china that everyone sensed encircled madly now everyone’s irked insensibly so now i get myself into deep water. Turgut Uyar     A few years ago, as I wandered the EphesusArchaeological Museum where the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are ondisplay, I saw a little boy standing stock-still, his eyes fixed on the eyes ofthe statue of Antinous. Though his mother persistently kept calling him to herside, the boy couldn’t pull himself away from Antinous’s attentive gaze, thestatue’s neck turned to the side. He gazed upon Antinous as though he could,just by looking, fill in the missing parts of that familiar object. At thetime, I’d thought of the boy’s frozen stance in front of the statue as a kindof admiration, but now when I envision the scene, a different possibility comesto mind. The boy, his fresh ego filled to the brim with curiosity and wonder,was waiting for Antinous, who hadn’t budged for approximately 1,900 years, toblink. Waiting for that inveterate statue, filled with emotion, to tremble. Dwelling on the gaze of that boy as he tried toovercome the sharp border between human and human-statue, dwelling on hisinsistent, staring, expectant focus, I think now about the borders of theobject in his focus, about how the border is itself bounded by everything else,about how every border in our world of perceptions is boundless. And indeed,although we cannot comprehend the bounds of the universe, even the universeitself has a border. Just as we can’t comprehend the boundlessness of so manyemotions whose names we don’t yet know. Last year, a Korean novel titled Badem (Almond) was releasedin Turkish. A “silent” novel in Turkish for the moment, it hasn’t yet beennoticed by readers. And yet, the novel’s senses are open, even as theprotagonist begins his life utterly lacking in emotion due to the insufficientdevelopment of the amygdala in his brain. This is the border that leaves himoutside of culture. He describes emotions by following the traces they leave inthe body, trying to recognize them by describing each one. Like a written text,he attempts to take on each emotion by rationalizing it. The ego, shaped byanger, trauma, and relationships, is, in his ghostliness, a perpetually blankpage. If what we call the ego is an orb of consciousness endlessly pulsing andbleeding in the tower of childhood, then the protagonist of Almond is shrewd but sans ego. He is a freak of nature.As a consequence, we might name him directly by his illness—Alexithymia, theinability to recognize emotions. The organic, pathological border ofAlexithymia makes the protagonist brave, for he knows no fear; tranquil, for heknows no joy; calm, for he knows no rush. In these times when we are trying tohear our inner selves, when we are learning to grapple with our egos throughdifferent kinds of meditation, Alexithymia appears as a freak of nature, as a realphenomenon in the face of the modern person imprisoned by emotions. Though hisbasic senses are highly developed, he lacks the intuition, instincts, andfaculties to turn whatever he touches into individual images or figures ofspeech, and he remains stuck in the realm of description. Because the reasonthe protagonist has been so successful in the realm of description is his lackof poetry. Or, more figuratively, his lack of a heart. It is remarkable thatthe habitat that Alexithymia narrates over the course of the story, purged asit is of emotion and thus of soul, is girded with such towering description.Life exists but its sensuous trace is missing. While the past becomes absolutein material forms, the mind cannot escape from its chronological ordering in analbum. The past, instrumentalized by Chronos, comes to resemble a vacantlandscape, completely disconnected from Cosmos’s involuted, polysemousperceptions. In this novel about a person who is nothing more than arationalized body, the story’s tragic weight is left entirely to the reader. Wefind ourselves taking on all the emotions in this poignant story. It’s almost as though the statue might tremble,isn’t it? At any moment it might tremble: it is about to tremble. We might read Almond as a novel that rather strikingly demonstratesthe possibility of a past without memory. In order to survive and to adapt tosociety, the protagonist has to cast off the appearance of having a heart ofstone by learning the common behaviors that emotions elicit. But that does notsuffice. Because adapting to one’s environment isn’t what makes a human human,but the oikos that forges him into something incomparable. A person in pursuitof the descriptions, figures of speech, and images that abstract the world,from the crudest to the most refined, finds his ego. Every ego is of course transitory. Every egotakes on new forms alongside new experiences; for the ego is not a sturdy,unchanging, fixed entity. As for Almond’s Alexithymia, that blank page in the mind is simultaneously a ballad ofpossibilities. But what I really want to touch on here, beyond the inherentpotential of the ego, is the process in which the protagonist, living on thedark side of its sensuous border, begins to come undone, which is to say, beginsto transform. Following all the horrible things he undergoes, our protagonistfeels neither grief nor solitude nor guilt nor sorrow, but he begins todiscover the oikos where he remains inintractable contact with a peer who experiences his emotions to an excessivedegree. Only a freak can heal another freak. The passage of our protagonistinto humanity scintillates in the relationship he forges with another personwho also could never have been a “normal” human. This novel maps out an unexpected route forthinking about the connections between borders, passages, and transformations;it reverses the usual path that emotions take from the heart to the brain,starting its adventure instead in the brain and coming to an end in the heart.One of the most striking insights that the novel offers the reader through itswayward references is this: that the well of morality is the heart, while thebrain is simply a living abode where moral law is governed. Another significantinsight is that counterparts never become one another. When it comes to theego, every dissimilarity that approaches another, that collides in approach,that bleeds in collision, serves as a sacred text to the outcast. Just asAntinous has stood for 1,900 years, about to tremble in the eyes of a boy, sothe boy there, too, is a prospective poet, ready to be sculpted by Antinous.
now i’ve found the great wall of china that everyone sensed encircled madly now everyone’s irked insensibly so now i get myself into deep water. Turgut Uyar     A few years ago, as I wandered the EphesusArchaeological Museum where the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are ondisplay, I saw a little boy standing stock-still, his eyes fixed on the eyes ofthe statue of Antinous. Though his mother persistently kept calling him to herside, the boy couldn’t pull himself away from Antinous’s attentive gaze, thestatue’s neck turned to the side. He gazed upon Antinous as though he could,just by looking, fill in the missing parts of that familiar object. At thetime, I’d thought of the boy’s frozen stance in front of the statue as a kindof admiration, but now when I envision the scene, a different possibility comesto mind. The boy, his fresh ego filled to the brim with curiosity and wonder,was waiting for Antinous, who hadn’t budged for approximately 1,900 years, toblink. Waiting for that inveterate statue, filled with emotion, to tremble. Dwelling on the gaze of that boy as he tried toovercome the sharp border between human and human-statue, dwelling on hisinsistent, staring, expectant focus, I think now about the borders of theobject in his focus, about how the border is itself bounded by everything else,about how every border in our world of perceptions is boundless. And indeed,although we cannot comprehend the bounds of the universe, even the universeitself has a border. Just as we can’t comprehend the boundlessness of so manyemotions whose names we don’t yet know. Last year, a Korean novel titled Badem (Almond) was releasedin Turkish. A “silent” novel in Turkish for the moment, it hasn’t yet beennoticed by readers. And yet, the novel’s senses are open, even as theprotagonist begins his life utterly lacking in emotion due to the insufficientdevelopment of the amygdala in his brain. This is the border that leaves himoutside of culture. He describes emotions by following the traces they leave inthe body, trying to recognize them by describing each one. Like a written text,he attempts to take on each emotion by rationalizing it. The ego, shaped byanger, trauma, and relationships, is, in his ghostliness, a perpetually blankpage. If what we call the ego is an orb of consciousness endlessly pulsing andbleeding in the tower of childhood, then the protagonist of Almond is shrewd but sans ego. He is a freak of nature.As a consequence, we might name him directly by his illness—Alexithymia, theinability to recognize emotions. The organic, pathological border ofAlexithymia makes the protagonist brave, for he knows no fear; tranquil, for heknows no joy; calm, for he knows no rush. In these times when we are trying tohear our inner selves, when we are learning to grapple with our egos throughdifferent kinds of meditation, Alexithymia appears as a freak of nature, as a realphenomenon in the face of the modern person imprisoned by emotions. Though hisbasic senses are highly developed, he lacks the intuition, instincts, andfaculties to turn whatever he touches into individual images or figures ofspeech, and he remains stuck in the realm of description. Because the reasonthe protagonist has been so successful in the realm of description is his lackof poetry. Or, more figuratively, his lack of a heart. It is remarkable thatthe habitat that Alexithymia narrates over the course of the story, purged asit is of emotion and thus of soul, is girded with such towering description.Life exists but its sensuous trace is missing. While the past becomes absolutein material forms, the mind cannot escape from its chronological ordering in analbum. The past, instrumentalized by Chronos, comes to resemble a vacantlandscape, completely disconnected from Cosmos’s involuted, polysemousperceptions. In this novel about a person who is nothing more than arationalized body, the story’s tragic weight is left entirely to the reader. Wefind ourselves taking on all the emotions in this poignant story. It’s almost as though the statue might tremble,isn’t it? At any moment it might tremble: it is about to tremble. We might read Almond as a novel that rather strikingly demonstratesthe possibility of a past without memory. In order to survive and to adapt tosociety, the protagonist has to cast off the appearance of having a heart ofstone by learning the common behaviors that emotions elicit. But that does notsuffice. Because adapting to one’s environment isn’t what makes a human human,but the oikos that forges him into something incomparable. A person in pursuitof the descriptions, figures of speech, and images that abstract the world,from the crudest to the most refined, finds his ego. Every ego is of course transitory. Every egotakes on new forms alongside new experiences; for the ego is not a sturdy,unchanging, fixed entity. As for Almond’s Alexithymia, that blank page in the mind is simultaneously a ballad ofpossibilities. But what I really want to touch on here, beyond the inherentpotential of the ego, is the process in which the protagonist, living on thedark side of its sensuous border, begins to come undone, which is to say, beginsto transform. Following all the horrible things he undergoes, our protagonistfeels neither grief nor solitude nor guilt nor sorrow, but he begins todiscover the oikos where he remains inintractable contact with a peer who experiences his emotions to an excessivedegree. Only a freak can heal another freak. The passage of our protagonistinto humanity scintillates in the relationship he forges with another personwho also could never have been a “normal” human. This novel maps out an unexpected route forthinking about the connections between borders, passages, and transformations;it reverses the usual path that emotions take from the heart to the brain,starting its adventure instead in the brain and coming to an end in the heart.One of the most striking insights that the novel offers the reader through itswayward references is this: that the well of morality is the heart, while thebrain is simply a living abode where moral law is governed. Another significantinsight is that counterparts never become one another. When it comes to theego, every dissimilarity that approaches another, that collides in approach,that bleeds in collision, serves as a sacred text to the outcast. Just asAntinous has stood for 1,900 years, about to tremble in the eyes of a boy, sothe boy there, too, is a prospective poet, ready to be sculpted by Antinous.
THEMES
+ moreAn increasing number of works of Korean literature published abroad have been winning literary and translation awards lately. This year alone, as of the end of May, two works which received funding from LTI Korea won an international literary award. Earlier this year in Japan, Sohn Won-pyung’s novel Counterattack at Thirty received the 2022 Booksellers' Award in the translated fiction category, and in the Czech Republic, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel Grass won the 2022 Muriel Award. In this edition of the Themes Series, we take a look at 5 translations that received funding from LTI Korea and went on to win an international literary award over the last two years. Spanning from modern to contemporary times, whether it be poetry, mystery, or even graphic novels, a wide and diverse range of Korean literary works have been garnering attention. Given the great amount of visibility they provide, international awards play an essential role in creating more opportunities for the further expansion of Korean literature abroad. We hope that such encouraging developments will give more readers around the world the chance to discover Korean literature. ㅣ Counterattack at Thirty Author Sohn Won-pyung Translator Yajima AkikoPublisher Shodensha Publishing Co., Ltd. Year of Publication 2021Originally published in Korea by Eunhaeng Namu Publishing in 2017. Counterattack at Thirty tells the story of a woman called Kim Ji-hye who interns at a large Korean company. Her life, until then uneventful, changes when she meets a man called Gyu-ok who has a strange aura about him, and who was born the same year as her, in 1988. The two share the same frustration at the fact that a mere 1 percent of society gets to unfairly control the remaining 99 percent which they belong to, and they decide to plot a scheme together to turn things around. This work is meant to shed light on the irrationalities of the authoritative social structure of Korean society as perceived by younger generations. It won the 2022 Japan Booksellers' Award in the translated fiction category. ㅣ Grass Author Keum Suk Gendry-KimTranslator Pentra Ben-AriPublisher CentralaYear of Publication 2021Originally published in Korea by Bori Publishing in 2017. Grass is a graphic novel which tells the life story of an old woman called Kim Ok-sun who was taken away at a young age to become a comfort woman in the Japanese Imperial Army. Drawn in plain black and white without exaggerating any of the violence or promoting hate toward the perpetrators, this title is meant to offer an honest window into the minds and hearts of real victims of sexual slavery in Korea. It won the 2022 Muriel Award organized by the Czech Academy of Comics in the translated works category. ㅣ The Disaster Tourist Author Yun Ko-eunTranslator Lizzie BuehlerPublisher Serpent’s Tail Year of Publication 2020Originally published in Korea by Mineumsa Publishers in 2013. The Disaster Tourist is about a woman called Yona Ko who works for a travel agency which specializes in trips to disaster-stricken regions. Before losing her job, she organizes a final trip to a sinkhole in the middle of the desert called “Mui,” where she unwittingly finds herself stranded and where she gets involved in a big project. This title won the 2021 Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger Award in the UK. ㅣ Moms Author Yeong-shin MaTranslator Janet HongPublisher Drawn & Quarterly Year of Publication 2020Originally published in Korea by Humanist Publishing Group in 2015. Moms is a graphic novel about mothers, who we are all so close to but who we actually know so little about. Although mothers are encouraged to sacrifice themselves for their families and love their children selflessly, and the media tends to portray middle-aged women as brazen and obstinate, the author uses a humorous tone to show that mothers can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to such clichés. This work won the 2021 Harvey Award for the best international book. ㅣ Yi Sang: Selected Works Author Yi SangTranslator Jack JungPublisher Wave Books Year of Publication 2020Originally published in Korea by Samjungdang Publishers in 1975. Yi Sang: Selected Works contains forty-nine poems, six essays, and two short stories originally written in Korean, as well as twelve poems originally written in Japanese. Yi Sang’s works, which were written in politically turbulent times in the 1930s in the midst of the Japanese occupation of Korea, are known for their distinctive literary style, which fit in the greater experimental literary movement of the early twentieth century. This title was awarded the MLA’s 2021 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for literary translation and was also shortlisted for the 2021 Lucien Stryk Asian translation prize.