Dublin Literary Award / -

2015 Printable Longlist : Book List (Lee Ki-ho, Jang Eun-Jin)

koreaherald / October 27, 2013

The first 10 volumes of Dalkey Archive Press and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea’s Korean literature series will be hitting U.S. bookstores on Nov. 16, the Korea-based translation institute announced Tuesday.   Source : http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20131017000941

koreatimes / March 23, 2014

Among numerous foreign publishers and scholars, the LTI has selected three winners from each language area — The Dalkey Archive Press (John O'Brien) for English, Adelaida F. Trotsevich for Russian and Argo (Milan Gelnar) for Czech.   Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/culture/2014/03/386_153886.html

TOTTALY DUBLIN / April 25, 2015

Despite the considerable international success of its musicians, filmmakers and contemporary artists, South Korea has never really figured on the global literary landscape. It’s difficult to know why exactly, especially from this vantage. The Korean language enjoys a comparatively belated relationship with the written word: it was without its own script until King Sejong introduced Hangeul to the masses in 1446. A less speculative explanation would point out that not very much of the work has been translated. This year Dalkey Archive has teamed up with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea to publish twenty-five new translations of contemporary Korean fiction. Totally Dublin took a look at three.

The Guardian / November 19, 2013

A young man, Jihun, travels through a series of nameless cities in Korea with his dog, Wajo, staying at motels every night. At each one he writes a letter to someone he has met on his travels, or to a member of his family. He then writes on the underside of the room's sink a brief record of his stay there, and moves on to another motel. Sometimes the motel will refuse to accept dogs; to get round this, he puts on dark glasses and pretends to be blind, saying Wajo is his guide dog. (In truth, it is the dog who is blind.) He does not refer to the people he meets by name, but instead assigns them a number.

list_Books from Korea / -

Alienation Without Pity: No One Writes Back by Jang Eun-jin   By Philip Gowman on Nov 16 2014 11:12:26 Vol.24 Summer 2014   No One Writes Back Jang Eun-jin Jung Yewon Illinois Dalkey Archive Press 2013 199pp. ISBN 9781564789600 I can’t remember having cried at the end of a novel before, particularly one in which nothing much happens. No One Writes Back is a beautiful gem that works its slow magic on you over the course of 152 numbered paragraphs of which the shortest is only three words, at least in the English translation. The blurb on the back of the book rather undersells it, pitching Jang’s writing as “…this sly update of the picaresque novel.” I had to look up what a picaresque novel was, and still have no idea why it might need a sly update. This novel can in fact easily stand on its own without being put in a particular literary context. And unusually for many Korean novels and short stories that have made it into an English translation, No One Writes Back can speak to a world audience without the need for a Korean primer. There are only two terms, White Day and Chuseok, that might lead a person with limited contact with Korean culture to head for a search engine, but both words and their significance are perfectly well explained on Wikipedia, and maybe these days do not need a footnote anyway. Otherwise, this poignant novel, in which nothing much happens but which talks about human communication and family relationships, speaks to people regardless of language and nationality. It is a fine choice to be included in Dalkey Archive’s first set of translations in their Library of Korean Literature. It deserves to stand well on its own as a novel, not as something to be studied as world literature.     Share. Twitter Face