--a 45-year-old novelist looks back on life & death, love & longing; all strictly framed by fairly quotidian standards & mores--

"Someone said there's an eternal land. And we're all like birds from that land, here for a short while before we fly off again. When you get there, I pray you will rest there forever, without worry that you'll have to come back for another life." p. 41

The novels and short stories put out in English by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea), the South Korean government's official literature promotion body, cover a very narrow range of the broader world of Korean literature. A pretty typical LTI Korea book is a short story or novella about youth and growing up in the 1950s or 1980s, written by a middle-aged man who won two or three of the same literary prizes when he started out as an author.

This generalized template is true for Kim Seungok (김승옥) (b. 1941) and his two short stories "Record of a Journey to Mujin" (1964) (무진기행) and "Seoul: 1964, Winter" (1965) (서울, 1964년 겨울), which are probably best of this lot. This is true for Kim Joo-Young (김주영) (b. 1939) and his novella "Stingray" (1998) (홍어). This is true for Jang Jung-il (장정일) (b. 1962) and "When Adam Opens His Eyes" (1990, t. 2013) (아담이 눈뜰 때), which added a bit of debauchery to the standard template. This is true for Hyun Ki-Young (현기영) (b. 1941) and his "One Spoon on This Earth" (1999, t. 2013) (지상에 숟가락 하나), which added massacres, politics and actual history to the standard template. This is true for Kim Won-il (김원일) (b. 1942) and his "The House With a Sunken Courtyard" (1988, t. 2013) (마당깊은 집). This is true for Choi In-hun (최인훈) (b. 1936) and "The Square" (1960, t. 2014) (광장). Pick any two or three of them and you'll get the gist of it.

If you were to judge Korean literature solely by the books put out in English by the LTI Korea, you'd think Korean writing was all the same, all written by one type of middle-aged male author, and all telling the same story. This broad sameness is then lessened even more because books put out by the LTI Korea are riddled with awkward English phrases, clunky translations, incorrect formatting and glaring, unprofessional typos.



Nonetheless, and glaring typos notwithstanding, if the LTI Korea had not translated Youn Dae-Nyeong's (윤대녕) (b. 1962) short story "Raising the Swallow" (제비를 기르다) into English, I would never have read it. It is a touching tale, if somewhat boiler plate ((사업상 서류・법률적 합의안 등의) 표준 문안), about a boy learning to accept the fact that he's a man. The male protagonist is dreamy and emotional, with oceans of misunderstood angst and tears buried in his sole, longing for understanding. The female protagonist is wooden, filling an easy archetype. It's a male tale written for the male mind.

Author Youn tells the tale, presumably his own, of growing up in an itinerant lower-middle class household and with a quasi-mystical mother. She would disappear for a fortnight every winter, beginning the day the swallows stopped returning to their roost. His youth, too, is marked by taking care of a baby bird that fell out of its nest. Later in his 20s, he revisits his rural childhood home outside of Seoul and notes the swallows living there. Swallows fly through his life. We are all swallows, flying through life.

"Raising the Swallow" (2007) is a pretty standard male tale of growing up in Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. It's a simple tale, a tale with which every other male South Korean citizen can identify. As is normal for this type of novel, the main character lives through the standard experiences that this type of author portrays, and it's all written according to the generalized template. As a child there are beatings and beatings, a broken household, bad parenting and kids who don't get the love they require from their parents.

There's the wild growth of glass and steel popping out of the mud flats and rice paddies. Korean economic growth? Check. There's military service. The communal bond between South Korean men? Check. There's awkwardly talking to a woman for the first time. Poorly socialized men unable to treat a woman as equal? Check.

Like French New Wave cinema, there are over-dramatized scenes and long gazes when nothing happens.

Add to this prostitution, a longing for an idyllic rural past and an emotional mother that protects you from an abusive father.

All of this relates, perhaps, to a South Korean male reader, or, indeed, to people at LTI Korea, but I can't imagine it grabbing a much wider audience. I enjoyed it as a casual page-turner, but, then again, I'm a 41-year-old male living in Korea.

"And just then, I witnessed flock after flock of hundreds, no, thousands of swallows descending on the plain. Some of the flocks floated low in the air, chirruping and trilling noisily as they maneuvered in flight, while another flock careened off and away in the direction of Mr. Mani, and yet another massive cluster seemed to be navigating straight toward us at the bus stop." p. 20

Page 21 offers some insight into the author's philosophy.

"So they don't always return," the main female protagonist asks about the swallows.

"...Only one percent ever return to where they were born."

"So what happens to the rest of them?"

"Some die, some fly to other places." (p. 21)

Some die and some fly to other places. Indeed, this could be author Youn's metaphor for life, as shown in these flighty scenes and shown in his final scene. Some die. Some fly to other places. It's not enlightening, or entertaining, and it's only slightly moving.

In terms of plot, the emotional university boy doing his military service meets the worldly girl studying home economics. They go on dates. They travel to Thailand. She, of course, has a real boyfriend elsewhere. By that, the author turns himself into a victim, a classic male trope (비유, 比喩). They see more swallows in Thailand. Mother talks about swallows when she meets the main female protagonist. The main male protagonist goes on about his suffering and drifting through life. More swallows gather on the roof of a bar where they go to talk. When they meet in the mid-2000s, both married, both with kids now, and both unhappy, the swallows flock there, too.

"The day I stop hearing the sound of the rocks rolling, I'll go back. But not until then." p. 32

The main female protagonist does have one cathartic moment. Abandoned on the side of a rural freeway, in the middle of the night, during a storm, she finds refuge in a deus ex machina grandfatherly-figure who offers her shelter from the storm. Her soul breaks. She is the only true actor in this pas de deux tale. The male protagonist doesn't do anything throughout the story. He has no character arc. She, however, takes action to control her life.

"...The roar of the rocks, deep rolling, booming sounds, as they were being washed downstream by the rapids.... As the sound of the rocks rolling down with the flood waters came to her ears, Mun-hui began to wail. It was like the sound of her soul crumbling around her." p. 33

At the end of the day, however, author Youn tells his tale of a middle-aged man looking back on his earlier life. The swallows come and the swallows go, carrying him across the waves from Ganghwa to Seoul and back again. As bad as the typos are, the author's voice comes through the translation and you can truly feel him, alone, trying to figure out life on his own. Then, when his own child is born, he sets about raising another swallow.

"As [my] child grew, I was amazed to see a tuft of hair appear on the nape of his neck, which people call a 'swallow's tail.' I'm told that as a young boy, I had one, too." p. 34

By Gregory C. Eaves
Korea.net Staff Writer
Photos: LTI Korea
gceaves@korea.kr