Narrative
Escape
탈출기
Choe Seo-hae · 1925
Opening lines
김군! 수삼 차 편지는 반갑게 받았다. 그러나 나는 한 번도 회답하지 못하였다.
Dear Kim! I was glad to receive your two or three letters. But I have not once replied.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ko.wikisource.org
Synopsis
In a letter to a friend, Pak explains why he left his mother and his wife. Driven by poverty, he had gone with them to Jiandao, in Manchuria, dreaming of a better life there; he found no land and had to accept every odd job, repairing stoves and heated floors, selling grass, while the two women pounded grain for others and gathered dead wood along the river. One day he catches his pregnant wife eating something in the kitchen and suspects her: it was a tangerine peel.
Context
The text appeared in March 1925 in Joseon Mundan; its author transposed his own years of emigration into it. The narrator, seeing the two women starving despite their work and unjust wages, comes to regard his poverty as a social fact and not as a personal matter, and the notice of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea reads in it a sense of responsibility turned towards national liberation. The University of Guelph site places the author among those who opened up the so-called new tendency literature, attentive to the poor workers of Jiandao and Hamgyong.
Who it is for
A brief narrative, written in the first person like a letter; it exists in English, but no French translation is recorded.
Prizes and reception
Translated into Chinese as early as 1958 and into Russian in 1960, then into Japanese in 2012 and into English in 2014, in a bilingual series.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.