The Web is My Friend!

After the computer (and ribs) trauma of the last weekend, I'm back up and running. The MacBook Pro is a cool machine and I've 'found' the latest Office and Dreamweaver online. A few more translation softwares to find and all I will need is Photoshop and a couple of other "big" apps that can't really be 'borrowed.'

In the meantime, I've been contacted by my author's (Kim Yong-ik) son! He saw some comments I made about his father online and he still lives in the family house, with papers and manuscripts intact. He also gave me contact info on several people who knew Kim, so that book I wanted to write might be back on.

I think I also mentioned here that Acta Koreana contacted me about a review, so I have three in the hopper. Add to that the paper I'm working on with Kim Soonyoung, and I'm a busy lad.

Still, it was an added bonus that I was also contacted by the son of Lee In-soo (about who, more later) who is interested in meeting. I think I need to email him soon.. now that I am fully technologized again!

Look, I'm a Scar!

Click on it and you'll see a version that is still only .66 the size the page was.

The Grind Down to the Grind (and some good news)

Been a long time since I posted here as I have been working on projects, small and large.

I've been editing like a madman on various pieces that just keep flying in on the mojo-wire.

Still getting my classes for Fall together. I refuse to go through the kind of chaos that last semester was. While my evaluations rose steadily, I'm still an egotistic little shit who wants to be at the top of the list, and I wasn't. It hurt my little ego.

Finally I've been working on the whole lit-deal, such as it is, over at Morningcalm.

The good news being that a semi-big article I wrote about translated Korean lit is just now published on the Sat-Sun Korea Herald (you can see it here - I am also the skilled photographer who didn't notice his own fat shadow on the pavement!).

I saw an article on Korean Lit in the Herald last Sunday and was kind of surprised, since the Herald is an English newspaper, that it only talked about works in Korean. On reflection this was not too surprising, since I bet many English-savvy Koreans pick up the English-newspapers to keep in practice. Still, on Monday I sat me down and slapped out about 1K words on good Korean Lit in translation. Gave it a once-over on Tuesday morning and it went skidding back out over the mojo-wire.

Wednesday I got a response that they wanted to publish on Saturday, but needed something graphic. The scan I sent of some of my body-parts was deemed too graphic in one sense, and not impressive enough in another. So I grabbed all the books and scanned the covers (which is what had been the graphic interest in the piece I first saw to start all this). But in the text of the article I named a couple of bookstores and in my email I said pictures were available.

Which is how I ended up out in the rain on Thursday afternoon, taking pictures and eventually meeting a lovely Canadian couple who I went out with for beers..

LOL.. all good... I got another publication for not much work and it's on the lit-tip...

And today was drop-dead gorgeous in Seoul - not so humid, a bit windy, even a hint of cool. Graduation day between terms so happy kids and parents running around between the colored parasols of flower-sellers; determined ajummas twisting roses and wrappings into photographs.

Nice-uh!

Korea Journal

Good news on the lit-front.. Looks like I will be reviewing two books for the Korea Journal

Toy City: Lee Dong-Ha, tr.Chi-Young Kim, (St. Paul)
Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: Park Wan-suh, tr. Yu Young-Nan and Stephen Epstein, (Columbia)

Which will be good for the CV, among other things....


Slightly more detail here at Morningcalm..

LOL.. that's right!

That would be three book reviews by me, published in 10 Magazine Asia. Not yet a literary juggernaut, but a convenient thing to do until that time comes..

"In the Depths"

A little something over at Morning Calm.

A Short Review of A Short Story - Twofold Song, by Yi Mun-yol

is available over at Morning Calm

Calling all Translators

This is barely news to expats, but the Times is making note of the reality in an article this morning

Literary Professor Kim Joo-youn said Korea badly needs a growing pool of professional translators to have local literature better known worldwide.

He made the remark in a Korea Times interview Thursday after being named the director of the Korea Literature Translation Institute (KLTI) under the Ministry of Culture.

Maybe this dude will hire BKF and me? ;-)

Cross-posted in its entirety at morningcalm.

Up To Seoul

Woke up yesterday and it was snowing in South Central. The OAF and I met at SC Yeok and headed up to Seoul. As the KTX rolled north the flurries of big snowflakes were replaced by blue skies and colder air.
We shopped a bit for clothing then headed to Itaewon for some bookshopping. We went to "What the Book" and entirely cleaned out their translated Korean literature section. Since the entire section was comprised of five slender volumes, each containing short stories by one author, this cleaning out process was brief. I got

Chinatown by 오숭히
A Toy City by 이텅하
Human Decency by 겅지영
House of Idols by 재인훈
An Appointment with my Brother by 이문열

These works range from 1960 to the late 90s and two of the authors are women, so it should be a good set. I want to read them all and review them here - also start some kind of notation system for elements and themes in them, in case I ever want to write something bigger about them.

A good trip, even if I didn't get the apartment I really wanted (right after I saw it, someone made an offer on it).

Several Theoretical Imperatives Supporting the Proposition That You Should “Shut the Fuck Up, You Moron!”

BPU2 have asked me to give a bit of a speech: 40 to 60 minutes. Somehow, this speech should relate to translation. Which is a bit odd as I am an editor and not a translator. Also, I’ve never bothered to try to sit down and work out a formal rationale for the thing.

Still, sitting in smoky rooms with the BKF, slugging down beers, and working our fitful magic on text, some vague outlines have emerged. The problem now is to work these inchoate themes and ideas out of my head – to untangle them from the detritus, the voices suggesting that I kill, then kill again and again until I can kill no more, forever – and get them into some clear English words that won’t unduly tax Freshmen.

No sweat.

Now I’m reading all these theoretical texts. Which only brings my general distrust of theories bubbling to the surface. It’s not that I like dislike theories per se, in fact they are similar to girlfriends – good when used appropriately, but becoming stuck on a particular one leads to madness (I should know!). Some time ago I came across the excellent article “The Hegemony of Theory” and today I found another excellent one in my intarwebs ramblings today. This is Maria Teresa Sanchez’ “Domesticating the Theorists: A Plea for Plain Language.”

It’s title is drawn from an absolutely horrible passage of academic jargon produced by Lawrence Venuti who describes translation as the “ethnocentric violence of domestication” that produces “the effect of transparency, the illusion that this is not a translation, but the foreign text.”
Well, I suppose we should call an immediate halt to that sort of thing, then?

Disregarding the reality that if we did, no literary work would ever cross any language barrier. If this is the conclusion that Venuti is drawing, he should be aware the he might simultaneously be arguing against his own tenure, as the elimination of translation might also mark the end of translation theory.

I suppose, in his own horrid way, this might be what he is after. If the pesky reality of translation were to disappear, theorists would have that situation they have eternally dreamt of, an empty and arid canvas on which to speculate. It is a simple dream of control – Like a man who, incapable of understanding women, wants them all gone, replaced with a mute and blank-faced dolls against which any kind of theoretical structures can be applied, and no hideous flesh-and-blood to argue, demonstrate, or remonstrate against those structures.

Sanchez takes Venuti to task for the obvious redundancy of “ethnocentric” and “domestication” as well as his commonplace that translation does violence (in the sense of meaning, though Venuti’s overheated prose seems intended to hint at darker and more hegemonic evils) to text. Then there is the notion that a translation causes an “effect” of transparency that leads people to believe they are reading the foreign text.

Well, other than the fact that readers generally seem to have a good handle on a) their native languages, and b) the languages they don’t know. Consequently they look for translations of foreign works. Heck, the translator’s name might even be on the book, just in case a reader were forgetfull.

Venuti’s language is the language of the smooth, thoughtless bureaucrat. It reminds me of something I read long ago – perhaps Lewis Gizzard, perhaps someone else, who, after noting that the Census had officially designated lovers as POSSLQ’s, commented something like, “I don’t exactly know what “Person of the Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters” was meant to imply, but they’ve just come up with the ugliest way I’ve ever heard of to describe two people who are fucking.”

Venuti, I suspect, is a tool.

In the bad way. ;-)

Rainology and Pourology

Heh,

BKF has enlisted my help on a little (130 page) deal with Ewha and, POW!, on my desk lands the possibility of a 300+ page work of fiction that needs help. Alla this due before the birthday falls.

Thank God it's November, is all I have to say..

Suwheeet!

The long missing Peace Education Conference just contacted me, and I am presenting on September 27th, in the afternoon.

Book me that ticket to Seoul!

And, or course, BKF is co-writer on the paper, so it's a win all around....

now.. I must party... they will find me just like they found Heath Ledger...

well, except he was fit and handsome.. but you know what I mean. ;-)

HOLY CRAP!

Just received a rather outstanding (but tentative, in Seoul, Korean language training built in, and the possible promise of another degree) job offer that would increase my stay in Korea.

Which I don't mind terribly, if there's plenty of vacation time to visit the two friends and 2.5 family members I still love. ;-p

OAF is down with it...

Korea, love it or leave it

Exclamation point to end that sentence, or question mark?

Heh, a nice calm weekend with the OAF erased by this mental turmoil...

Updates...

Some Notes about the Academic Silliness

1> Somewhere in the WayBack Machine I'm sure I mentioned that I've found new stories by my lovely author. But I've also found a book called 미주문학 (America's Literature) that has a 56 page article on my main man. The thing is in Korean, which has already caused me to spend about a half an hour struggling with Korean names, words, the way they list things, and all of the "markers" Korean uses to denote role in sentences and... and.... I translated one sentence.. kind of. ;-)

I spent some time with my tutor working on this and I hope it will eventually go faster.

2>The lovely tutor has also tracked down what is supposed to be a 60 page collection of The Author's notes on his own writing. 60 pages each of the English and Korean version. Man, I'm salivating about getting my hands on that baby...

Then, I just sent off to the BKF my second iteration of edits on the Camel Pouch story he is turning in to the Korean Language Translastion Institute for their annual competition. It is due August 31 and I just feel that this one has a better chance than last year's. Lots of slogging ahead, but time and will to do it.

3> Last weekend's trip up to Itaewon did result in my grabbing two key books for my MCTA presentation. I really should blog the pictures of that trip since the OAF and I had some pleasant surprises all around.

Anyway, it all seems like progress, albeit in small ways. ;-)

So, if you can't seem to finish the paper due this Friday.. why not start another one?

More evidence I'm a retard. ;-)

Actually, got up to about 1,500 words on the Kuala Lumpur paper, so halfway there and it is all mapped out. Emailed the folks at the "peace studies" conference. They were supposed to contact us on the 18th of July, but I haven't heard a word back. Their website also hasn't changed.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were all out back smoking something skunky and making wool-and-stick mandalas for the tourist trade. Or plotting to violently overthrow the government.

One of the two.

It is ungodly hot here in the third level of hell and I am soon to run out of Mint Juleps.

The horror......

Serendipity DooDah!

Just dorking around on the intarwebs trying to find contact info on my beloved Kim Yong-ik and, lo and behold, the Korea Journal has placed their archives on the web and there are 6 "new" pieces. Three are some kind of retread, so it may be that Kim was starting to coast in his late life. In any case, I'm excited to find them and the pieces are:

"Andy Crown" - Published in Nov. 1987: This is a pretty bad retelling of the "They Won't Crack It Open" story with the US lead cast as a Black Man. Nicely, this re-writing supports my contention that Kim is most effective when least overtly political.

"The Gold Watch" - Published in March 1989: This one is new to me and I will have to read it before comment.

"The School Bell" - April 1990: This is a chapter from "The Happy Days" (1960) published as a short story.

"The Smuggler's Boat" - March 1965: This is new to me, even though it is by far the oldest of the stories found here.

"Village Moon" - December 1983: This is a part (although a quick reading seems to catch some substantial differences) of the play "The Moon Thieves" which was written prior to 1982.

"Village Wine" - December 1983: A new one; a play featuring a US soldier in a Korean style house.

Paper accepted at "ENGLISH and ASIA: First International Conference on Language and Linguistics 2008"

In world-record time the folks at this conference got back to me and accepted my proposal for a presentation on Kim Yong-ik. This is in Malaysia around the time of my birthday and the only possible snag is if BPU will let me get away for it.

Well, I'll quit if they don't, really. This is a paper about a Korean author by the employee of a Korean University. I'm part of the wave, baby! ;-)

And it is pretty inexpensive to get there. The conference is 200,000 won and if I were (unlikely) able to get the whole week off the whole thing (flight and hotel inclusive) would be about 1.3 million won.

Not bad for a vacation and work trip.

ah... the rather poor (I have to start writing these things sooner than the day of the deadline) abstract is here:

Kim Yong Ik: Unimagining “Asian American” Through English

Kim Yong-Ik, a Korean by birth and English writer by trade attempted to avoid questions of empire, orientalization, language and literary theory by declaring autonomy from them. Kim was avowedly anti-political, extra-theoretical, and purposefully resistant to ethnic, political or theoretical placement. Kim publicly argued that his work was not concerned with contested terrains, and purposefully wrote in a dispassionate and narratively simple and concrete style. His writings, antithetically to his confessed approach, obsessively concerned themselves with issues attendant to cultural clash: oppression, the state of the outsider to the state, disconnection, diaspora, and the dream of coming to a “home” that was not contested; a home of ancestral imperials and not imperialists. This tension between language use and content essentially mirrored the tensions that Kim was describing between the United States and Korea.

Focusing on “They Won’t Crack it Open,” (The sole remaining work of Kim’s in print) this paper will discuss the arc of Kim’s individual works, literary oeuvre, career, and life and to what extent his approach gave him the freedom to write, to what extent it clashed with his written work and, finally, to what extent he found himself Occidentalized by his self-aware extra-theoretical approach.

Collecting Bones, Korea and Korean Literature. Being Part One.

First, I have to admit that this computer teases me. Old number 10 at the PC Bang always starts up trying to load its "Hamachi adapter."

But it always fails and the sushi is never mine!

O cruel fate...

Anyway.. here's the beginning of a 1 to 5 part thing on borders, korea and its literature. 1 is if I get bored. or distracted..

Hey, is that Rain?

OH...
-----------------------------------

Dokdo
(From Korea.net)

Somewhere in “Snow Crash” Neal Stephenson notes that, “interesting things happen along borders – transitions – not in the middle where everything is the same.”

Which is, of course, why I am in Korea.

Many years ago I collected skulls.

This began when my mother and sister moved far up into some ridiculous mountains for which they should have been issued lisps, stalks to chew on and banjos to play whilst contemplating the sodomization of lost flatlanders. I would visit, and on one visit – lo and behold – I found the skull of something.

As a suburban lad I was shocked and secretly pleased. I grabbed a stick and used it to carry the skull, which was not entirely cleaned by nature, back to my mother’s house.

People shrugged.

Sheep skull.

Sheep were herded in the meadow I had travelled. At the spot where, beginning to walk up the surrounding slopes, I had found the skull, ecologies collided. Wolves skulked in the trees and any sheep unlucky enough to wander out of the meadow risked a brief and lethal interaction.

Food chain.

Still, I was obscurely proud of having found the skull and began collecting animal bones.

I have also always been a fan of trains. I’ve ridden them, legally and illegally, for years and as an inveterate walker have worked out that they work as something like trails. In even the most rural or urban environments you might expect to find some train tracks to walk on. And so I do. I would find the most interesting things there. The tracks in Soda Springs often contained, between them, the creosote-covered bodies of dead frogs. I never quite figured this one out. I guessed the frogs got between the tracks (there were safe watery havens on each side of the raised tracks) and then, in the mid-day heat, could not quite navigate their ways back out. How they got creosoted is still a mystery to me. It had to have something to do with the trains that passed above their corpses, but I could never tease out the exact thing. Possibly, they were quite aware of the tracks they had to hop and were optimistic about how the whole thing would turn out. Right up til that unfortunate moment the… (“whatever”)…. creosoted them.

I wish I could get some kind of grant to explore this phenomenon.

It occurred to me that the railroad tracks were a condensed microcosm of the meadow and the hills and that what I was seeing was the interactions of the borderlands. On the train-tracks, ecosystems collided on a razor-thin border. Train tracks being one ecology, the three yards on either side of them being the next ecology, and then the “normal” world beyond.
In the big city, where I primarily lived, dogs and cats would die, or be disposed of, on the tracks. Occasionally a school child or drunk would be harvested by trains, but I was never allowed to get close enough to this event to win a skull.

Still, I thought “border” and, less charitably, “food chain.”

When I lived in Newark California I frequently found dead chickens on the tracks. This was a different kind of border. These chickens were losers (Other than the “SuperChicken” animated comic of my youth, I am at a loss to point to many times chickens have been winners). Hispanics in the neighborhood had cock-fights and knew they couldn’t toss chickens out in their garbage or they’d be turned in. So they looked for the next ecosystem and tossed their loser chickens there. Once I found some fish that had been tossed out and had resolved to nothing but their cartilagineous and bony cores. I still have on of those fish on a kind of art-thing that I put on the mantle of any home I inhabit. I think everyone should have a little “Yorick” thing in their homes. Just a reminder.

Then I moved to Korea and found the mother of all borders. A land that had no land – it was all borders.
(continued Monday)