Translating Pyongyang Modernism: On Ch'oe Myŏngik's Short Fiction

Speaker: Janet E. Poole, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Chair, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Moderator: Ruth Barraclough, Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Modern Korean History, History Department; Director, Center for Korean Research, WEAI

Janet Poole's research and teaching interests lie in literary and aesthetic forms in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in histories and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation. Her most recent book, Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories, presents an introduction to the little known modernist writer Ch’oe Myŏngik (1903-?). Born and based in Pyongyang throughout his career, Ch’oe’s work lovingly details life in that city and chronicles the hopes and dreams for a new society in the age of decolonisation. A dedicated literary translator, Poole has also translated works by the mid-twentieth century writer Yi T’aejun (1904-?). A collection of his anecdotal essays written during the Asia-Pacific War, Eastern Sentiments, offers a quirky take on everyday life in 1930s Korea: wistful, nostalgic and violently colonial. A selection of Yi's short stories written between 1925 and 1950, by which time he had moved to North Korea, appeared as Dust and Other Stories. The latter was awarded a residency fellowship from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.

A new book project, “Decolonizing Style: Going North and the History of Korean Modernism,” looks at the writings of Korea’s modernist writers and artists who crossed the 38th parallel into what was to become the Democratic People’s Republic in the late 1940s. A study of decolonization as a literary event, the project was awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant in 2017 and a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship in 2020. The project follows upon an earlier study of modernist responses to the fascist regime of the late colonial era, When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea. The book explored the possibilities of art under the harshest of political regimes, the shaping power of colonial fascism and the creative arts that emerged from its midst. It was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2015) and Honorable Mention for the Association of Asian Studies James B. Palais Prize (2016). A discussion of the book can be found in an episode of the Korea and the World podcast.

Prof. Poole will speak about her new book, Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories, which was released by Columbia University Press in April 2024.

Korean writer Ch’oe Myŏngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic. As Pyongyang transformed from Korea’s second city, peripheral to the Seoul-centered literary scene, into a socialist capital in the late 1940s, Ch’oe briefly ascended to the center of North Korean culture. Despite the vitality and originality of Ch’oe’s writing, Cold War politics and censorship, including South Korea’s anticommunist laws, consigned his work to obscurity.
Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories presents a selection of Ch’oe’s short fiction in translation, including later works from hard-to-find North Korean publications. These cinematic, keenly observed tales explore Pyongyang in meticulous detail, depicting the city’s transformations and the conflicts between old and new. They pay close attention to the lives of the disaffected and the marginalized: a drifter confronts a former revolutionary dying of opium addiction; a sex worker is trafficked across the border aboard a train, amid the indifference of her fellow passengers. Later stories provide a striking glimpse of the Korean War—the occupation of Pyongyang, U.S. fighter jets bombing civilian refugees, guerrilla heroics—from a North Korean perspective. Hidden treasures of world literature, these stories offer new perspectives on Korea’s turbulent twentieth century, across political divides still in place today.

This event is hosted by the Center for Korean Research at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

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Host or Publisher Weatherhead East Asian Institute