Dust and Other Stories Read online

  Yet the arc of Hyŏn’s life in “A Tale of Rabbits” suggests a violence increasingly encroaching upon Yi’s rather sentimental world. The nostalgia that accompanies the sense of an end to a time of growth and opportunity does not merely refer to middle age here but is decisively shaped by the larger geopolitical situation. As a decidedly nonsocialist aesthete, Yi had been unaffected by the first roundups of Korea’s top socialist thinkers in 1931, roughly coinciding with the so-called Manchurian Incident and the founding of the Manchukuo puppet regime. When in January 1935 the leaders of Korea’s proletarian arts movement (Korea Artista Proleta Federatio, or KAPF) declared its official end under intense suppression, the waning of its dominance over the literary scene might even have been welcomed by Yi, who valued the noninstrumental celebration of the arts. But a self-made man such as Yi could only have been devastated to watch an ever-tightening surveillance unfold. His fortunes had risen with that of the printed Korean word, but that print’s public life came under threat with the onset of war in China in 1937 and the opening of a second front in the Pacific in 1941. The response of the Japanese state was to move toward a regime of total mobilization, including the attempt to violently assimilate its Korean colony into the “Japanese nation” through a host of new policies. In 1938 Korean was declared an optional language of study in Korea’s schools, with Japanese established as the national language and Korean eventually equated with the status of mere dialect by colonial bureaucrats. In 1940 the major vernacular daily newspapers were closed down, along with many of their sister magazines, and subsequently the spaces for Korean print shrank dramatically. From 1938 Koreans were allowed to “volunteer” for the Imperial Army, but from 1942 they would be drafted, while writers were induced to take part in propaganda tours recruiting support and volunteers for the ongoing war. A guaranteed livelihood, writing in Korean, and soon freedom from the fear of colluding in or dying for the colonizer’s war now all became legitimate objects for nostalgia.

  The stories at the center of this collection date from this period of great uncertainty, which was paradoxically Yi’s most productive time as a writer. The impulse for the journeys into the countryside that form the settings for “The Frozen River P’ae,” “The Hunt,” “Evening Sun,” and “Unconditioned” lies in the unease with everyday life in the capital, which was more closely associated with the economic and political regime of the empire. The nostalgia for a past that is simpler and less commercial is one way of registering Yi’s disquiet with his present, but also forms the creative impulse for imagining alternative fictional worlds. “The Frozen River P’ae” and “Evening Sun” take their protagonists to the provincial cities of Pyongyang and Kyŏngju, respectively: both cities were associated with a decidedly feminized and exoticized past, which was at the time becoming the focus of commercial tourism.9 Visitors from throughout the empire traveled to see Kyŏngju’s temples and ancient burial mounds, or to Pyongyang, where they hoped to consort with the famous kisaeng performers, supposedly the most beautiful women in all of Korea. Yi tends to be unsparingly critical of this commercialization of the past, but he was hardly free himself from the contemporary craze for tradition and all things old. From 1939 until 1941 he worked as editor for the journal Munjang (Writing), one of two Korean-language literary journals that managed to publish past the closure of the vernacular newspapers. Munjang championed Korea’s new young writers, but had a decidedly antiquarian bent, from its cover and interior designs to its rediscovery and serialization of Korea’s literary classics, and explorations of the nature of traditions. In “Evening Sun” we see a hint of a decadent nonreconciliation with the present, which Sŏ Insik had cited as the potential for a future-oriented politics, but we also see how the story ultimately diffuses that conflict and returns Hyŏn to the capital at its end. The story thus provides material for contradictory claims that were later made about its author: (1) that he disdained the world-changing power of colonialism and protected the nation’s traditions, and (2) that he adopted a fundamentally “passive” stance to life that colluded with the imperial power. Such claims were to exert real-life effects when Japan’s colonial rule came to an end.

  “Before and After Liberation” is often read as a documentary witness to life during the final months of the Pacific War and the imperial state’s efforts to mobilize writers to its cause. In the story, Hyŏn escapes to a rural village in 1943, where he lives a rather dilettantish life of fishing and reading until news comes of Japan’s defeat in war and he returns to Seoul. The story reads equally, and not accidentally, as a kind of apology for a life of passivity and a public declaration of Yi’s transformed attitude to life and politics in the post-Liberation world. By the time the story appeared, one year after Liberation, Yi T’aejun had moved to the northern zone and was touring the Soviet Union as a representative of what would later be called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. There is no mistaking the difficult real-life maneuvering demanded by Yi’s past actions and new location. As Liberation soon revealed itself to be the rapidly polemicizing landscape of national division, the question of how one had lived under colonial occupation was a charged one in both the northern and southern zones, with potentially deadly accusations of collaboration thrown about widely. Yi was undoubtedly trying to preempt the criticism of his behavior that would surely be thrown at him by colonial-era socialist writers. But “Before and After Liberation” also stands as a literary testimony to dividing forms and language. As the scene shifts in the second part of the story, so does the sentence length, style, and language. The uneasy gaze at the retreating figure of Headmaster Kim at the end of the story bids farewell to a much larger realm of old things, thinking, and knowledge that must be routed with the rupture brought on by the new world.

  Two other stories included here suggest that the revolutionary power of the new world was far from total and that it was not so easy to discard the past. If “Tiger Grandma” offers an entertaining take on Yi’s long-held fascination with colorful subaltern characters, the longer “Dust” recalls the figure of the antiquarian and an old man struggling to reconcile to his present. That present is now a divided land, and the old man takes center stage, but is afraid of becoming a mere speck of dust caught up in the turmoil of historical change, as a recurring metaphor describes his situation. Are we correct to read Hyŏn into the old man’s thoughts, or has Hyŏn merely disappeared in the writing of a good story? Throughout the quarter century of Yi’s career represented by this collection, his fiction verged on autobiography to an ultimately undeterminable degree. There is no reason to believe his works written in the North are any less fictional than the earlier ones.

  In retrospect, many critics have been flummoxed by Yi’s decision to move to the socialist zone, but in this he shared a decision made by many of the colonial era’s most well-known modernist writers and artists. The majority believed the authentically new lay to the north, and we should perhaps consider this a legacy of the exploitative nature of Japan’s colonial rule, which caused socialism to be seen as a more viable prospect by many, even by some who shared Yi’s previously rather noncommittal political thinking. Despite his early acceptance by the northern regime, however, by the early to mid-1950s Yi began to be subjected to extreme criticism for “bourgeois thinking,” a charge that would be hard to deny, given the amount of evidentiary proof left by his voluminous works. Finally, he was sent into exile: a fate shared by so many of those who had crossed from the South, although less severe than the executions that felled others. His whereabouts thereafter are unclear, and, despite many poetic rumors of him ending up working in a print shop or even a brick factory, the circumstances of his final years and death remain unknown.

  Throughout his career, Yi T’aejun had despised above all the instrumentalization of art, despite having himself relied upon it for his own livelihood. He was probably most aesthetically in tune with the diffused literary world that emerged after the suppression of socialism and the proletarian art movemen
t. As a member of the Group of Nine he had explicitly criticized the attitude to the arts of some of the proletarian writers, and as a newspaper editor he had championed the poetry of Yi Sang (1910–1937), whose abstract work had scandalized the public with its incomprehensibility and attracted demands that it not be published. It was in this sense that Yi T’aejun had demanded a literature that arose “from the individual alone”; not from the demands of the Communist Party, but neither from the propagandistic desires of the wartime state or the capitalist market. The vicissitudes of mid-twentieth-century Korea were to provide little space for an artist such as Yi.

  This collection of Yi T’aejun’s short stories aims to introduce some of the best of his fiction. It also strives to present work from across his entire known career. Extreme censorship has silenced his work in the two states on the Korean peninsula that he called home: he is unpublished in North Korea today and was only belatedly lifted out of oblivion in the South with the relaxation of laws in 1988, which had prevented the publication of works by those artists who chose to go north either before or during the Korean War. Although freely read in South Korea today, collections of his work invariably separate stories written after he went north into a separate volume, reinforcing a sense of their illegitimacy, both political and literary. The field of English translation has followed, and fallen behind, these publication practices, with the result that works written in the North are rarely translated at all and often refused the title of “literature” in a legacy of Cold War thinking. This collection thus attempts to conjoin two things rarely read together—the before and after of Liberation. Despite the polemical divides of before and after, and North and South, we can see many continuities in Yi’s work that point to a writing life, a coherent aesthetic ideal, and an ongoing love of the written word.

  In 1933 the poet Kim Kirim (1908–?) praised Yi’s work by labeling him a “stylist” in a move that has occasionally worked to undermine Yi’s achievements as a writer of fiction.10 But if we understand “style” to mean the riches of creative experimentation and attention to language at a time when literature in the Korean language was still barely established, then the term captures some of Yi’s unique qualities and innovation as a writer. To the translator, “stylist” signals a challenge of a different dimension, of course. I have attempted to match Yi’s quiet and measured prose, for though a stylist, Yi was not ostentatious in his use of language. I have suggested his nuanced play with words where possible, but Yi often played with the multiple languages in use in colonial Korea, and it is not easy to reproduce the tiers of meaning between the imperial language of Japanese and its colonial Korean counterpart when translating into English. Even harder to convey is Yi’s profound love and use of dialect, especially when depicting colorful characters from different classes and regions of Korea, but neither does it seem right to ignore this. When we consider that the Korean Language Society had announced the first attempt to standardize the written Korean language only in 1936, when Yi was entering mid-career, we can see that his explorations with dialect, newly visible in response to the standardization of language, constituted more than mere personal taste. On this point, however, the translator is doomed to fail. I have tried to gesture toward Yi’s different languages, but exchanging them with supposedly equivalent ones from other worlds seemed untrue to Yi’s claim for their particularity.

  The move north for Yi proved to be not only a political move, but also a stylistic one. A striking change in tone divides a story such as “Before and After Liberation,” where the two halves of the story and their different aesthetic worlds demand a differentiation in everything from style to worldly references and diction. If the language in my translation of the second half of that story, and of the later story “Dust,” seems somehow less opaque and more instrumental, this is because it attempts to follow Yi’s Korean, which became noticeably streamlined in adapting to a new reality. In the 1930s, Yi often wrote about the significance of the long sentence as a guiding post for the organization of his style and as a characteristically Korean creative form. I have thus tended to keep to Yi’s sentence breaks, even where others might be more inclined to break up the long sentences into more palatable bites for the Anglophone reader. I am mindful also that the Anglophone reader of Yi’s time would probably have had more patience with his sentences’ meandering form. A translation will always necessarily remain an approximation, but I hope at least to have suggested some of the nuance and creativity of the stylist Yi T’aejun.

  Finally, I should add a note on the multiple versions of colonial-era texts. Many of Yi’s stories were first published in journals in the mid to late 1930s. Early in the 1940s they were often republished in single-volume collections of his short stories, and yet more single-volume collections appeared in the aftermath of Liberation. With each new publication the stories were altered to various degrees. Some of these alterations seem to suggest the author tidying up repetitions or awkward phrasings, whereas others suggest the changing landscape of censorship as the historical situation unfolded. In South Korea the practice is to refer to the last version of the text touched by the author. I have, for the most part, followed this practice, except in cases where it seemed clear that censorship of content rather than the polishing of style had brought about changes, for example, in “A Tale of Rabbits,” where I translated the first version from 1941. I have used a later version of “Unconditioned,” where Yi added a lengthy final section when he republished the story in 1943, one year after its initial publication. The title “Unconditioned” may seem obscure at first, but refers to a Buddhist notion of liberation from the conditioning of everyday life, something to which perhaps the main character aspires. In the case of “The Frozen River P’ae,” sentences from the 1938 version were removed in 1941, rather than rewritten, and I have been able to include them in parentheses to allow readers to draw their own judgments on the kinds of changes Yi made.

  All but one of the stories I have translated date from 1935 or later, despite the fact that Yi made his literary debut a decade earlier. During that first decade he wrote some two dozen stories that would perhaps be best described as minor sketches, a passage toward his later achievements. There are simply too many to include here, but I have included the first version of “Omongnyŏ,” a story that Yi republished with significant alterations in a 1939 collection. In this case his alterations seem to record an interesting shift away from the presentation of the flamboyant personality of the lead character and toward the movements of her husband and lovers in response. I have preferred to translate the earlier version as a record of a dynamic female character, who seems to disappear from Yi’s writing for a while only to make a spectacular return in the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic in the form of Tiger Grandma.

  A brief glossary at the end of this volume identifies the many contemporary figures of the Korean writing scene that are mentioned by pen name only in the stories “The Rainy Season” and “A Tale of Rabbits.” Although references to other writers also appear in other stories, their significance is explained within each story itself, and I have not included their details in the glossary.

  NOTES

    1. Yi T’aejun, Ssoryŏn kihaeng [Record of a journey to the Soviet Union] (Seoul: Cho-Sso Munhwa Hyŏphoe, Chosŏn Munhakka Tongmaeng, 1947), 1–2.

    2. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Phaidon, 1995).

    3. For a more detailed discussion of Yi’s work and late colonial Korean literature more broadly, see Janet Poole, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). On Yi and other members of the Group of Nine and their thinking about language, see Christopher P. Hanscom, The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013).

    4. Yu Chongho, “In’gan sajŏn ŭl ponŭn ch
aemi” [The pleasure of reading the dictionary of humankind], in Yi Sŏnyŏng, ed., 1930 nyŏndae minjok munhak ŭi ŭisik [The consciousness of 1930s national literature] (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1990), 293–307.

    5. Yi T’aejun’s most famous collection of anecdotal essays has been translated as Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, trans. Janet Poole (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

    6. “The Short Story and the Conte,” in Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, 61.

    7. “For Whom Do We Write?,” in Yi T’aejun, Eastern Sentiments, 53.

    8. Sŏ Insik, “Hyangsu ŭi sahoehak” [The sociology of nostalgia], Chogwang [Morning light] 6, no. 11 (November 1940): 182–89.

    9. Nayoung Aimee Kwon has written about the related prevalence of imperial nostalgia and what she calls “colonial kitsch” at this time in her Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).

  10. Kim Kirim, “Sŭt’aillisŭt’ŭ Yi T’aejun ssi rŭl nonham” [On the stylist Mr. Yi T’aejun], Chosŏn ilbo [Chosŏn news], June 25–27, 1933.