Short stories
관촌수필
Not translated into English
Yi Mun-gu · 1977
Synopsis
The narrator, who speaks in the first person, looks back on his childhood in Gwanchon, a village in Chungcheong. The cycle comprises eight narratives: the first five retrace his childhood, the sixth a childhood friend found again after he left, the last two his return to the village. The first brings back to life the grandfather, a scholar attached to the old customs, whom the child preferred to his stern father; others portray Ongjeom, Sin Hyeon-seok and other figures left on the margins of modernisation, in the language of the region and in the more learned language of the grandfather.
Context
The eight narratives were gathered in 1977 into a cycle of linked stories. The Literature Translation Institute notes that their language, the Chungcheong dialect mixed with the grandfather's Chinese turns of phrase, stands against the standard language promoted by the dictatorship of development, and reads in it the nostalgic archive of a language and a way of life that are disappearing; it regards the book as a classic of peasant fiction, which challenges forced-march industrialisation and calls for a return to concern for the human being.
Who it is for
Linked tales, in a dense regional language; translated into Chinese in 2012 and into Japanese in 2016, but not into French.
Prizes and reception
The filmmaker Park Chan-wook said that one of the pieces of luck in being born Korean was being able to read it without translation.