Translator Janet Poole Talks Happy Endings in North Korean Literature

With his coat collar raised against spitting rain, a Humphrey Bogart type might have walked the streets of Choe Myeongik’s Pyongyang. At least that’s how I see Pyongil, the main character of “Walking in the Rain,” published in 1936 in northern Korea, the first story from the collection Patterns of the Heart. Gazing up at the city’s enormous ancient gates on his way to work at a factory, Pyongil occasionally stops by a talkative photographer’s studio with whom he shares too many drinks. Patterns of the Heart underlines the country’s hardboiled, hard-drinking characters, its poverty, its modern sensibility, and its tragic romance.

But when Choe holds all this up to the light of his prose, like a Vermeer still life, the city, the country, and its figures seem to glisten and gleam. His visual descriptions are precise, beautiful: “Pyongil yawned and stared at the right ear, which was now red as a tangerine slice” and spots a young gisaeng in the light of the rickshaw man’s lantern: “the face flecked with the soft down of a freshly hatched chick still hovered before his eyes; together they reminded him of a blade of grass on which he had cut his finger as a child.” 

Spanning from the 1930s to the 1950s, these nine short stories observe the lives of a failed revolutionary addicted to morphine, bookish types confronted by dying fathers and lovers, a woman being trafficked on the train to Manchuria, a young hero leading a prison break, and more.

The publication of these northern and North Korean short stories, written about a century ago, into today’s English by Janet Poole is nothing short of miraculous.

A Pyongyang native, Choe Myeongik lived and wrote through the Japanese occupation, the liberation, the emergence of the North Korean communist state born out of Soviet occupation, and then the war. His works were banned by South Korea until the 1990s. Prior to his short story collection, Janet Poole translated the celebrated Yi Taejun’s essays and stories and wrote When the Future Disappears.

I spoke to translator and professor of Korean literature Janet Poole about northern Korea’s transition into North Korea, men of no character, and revolutionary dreams.

Esther Kim: You write in your translator’s note you long dreamed of translating Choe Myeongik (Ch’oe Myŏngik; Choi Myong Ik). Can you describe where you first hit upon Choe’s name?

Janet Poole: I first heard of Choe Myeongik a long time ago when I first went to Korea for my dissertation research around the late 1990s. He’s not a particularly well-known or canonical writer. Even today, when I talk to people in Korea, apart from scholars, most haven’t heard of him. I was writing a dissertation on modernism, and a friend of mine said well, you should look at the work of Choe Myeongik because I was interested in urban stories, and how the city was described in 1930s Korea.

Of course, I was intrigued to hear that his city is Pyongyang. Once I read his stories, I realized how much the Cold War had shaped my own reading of the past because I had just spent several years thinking about the city of Seoul. And actually, for me, some of the most touching urban stories from that era study Pyongyang, which I thought was fascinating.

EK: Was it easy or somewhat difficult to translate his stories?

JP: Now his language is quite hard. Choe Myeongik is a real stylist, who wrote these really, really long sentences. That’s one of the issues. It’s a trend in the 1930s. But his are super long. They can be oblique, and there’s many dialects from the north you can’t always figure out. Dictionaries are not always helpful. People often don’t know what they mean. He’s also quite an intellectual. From his stories, he’s obviously well-read in European literature and Japanese literature. He’s really interested in words, dialect, and lexicon. I think he picks words carefully. He’s also interested in dialogue. That can be really hard to figure out on the page when he’s deliberately showing different classes of people, peasant characters as well as the urbanized. They can be quite hard to understand. And the last thing is, a lot of words have disappeared.

 EK: Since the stories range from the 1930s into the 1950s, and northern Korea splits off into North Korea, I felt that the stories go from the grimmer underbelly of a city to a scrubbed “healthy realism” after 1945. For example, “The Engineer” (1952) is a story of sacrifice and heroism. It felt like some of the endings became more like television. Neatly tied. Why are there more happy endings versus sad endings after the division?

JP: For most of Choe Myeongik’s life—he was born in 1903—he grew up under colonial occupation, and after such a long period of colonial rule, that longing for independence was real. That desire to escape the society that’s being built in the late ‘30s, and the war time in the earlier stories, so then the dream of independence is real. Especially in the way it played out in Korea where the country got divided immediately and then everything became chaotic, especially in the South.

In the North, people bought into this real feeling of “We’re trying to build something different.” Now, in Choe’s case, he was already living in Pyongyang, so he just stayed where he was. There were writers who moved from the South to the North. And he just stayed where he was. I should also say that there were lots of people who moved from the North to the South, so he decided to stay.

A writer, ­­­who has been so attuned to and critical of society under one Japanese colonial, capitalist wartime regime, would want to be part of something that was better. I think that feeling probably would be individual, but also more broadly shared in society.

I also don’t want to be naive. I’m sure there’s also political pressure as well. I’m stressing the individual to you because I feel that everyone goes straight to political pressures first. But I feel that they might be coming together.

So “The Engineer” when I first heard that story, I read the first version. And I tried in this book to include both versions because there’s a different ending in the later version. And the first version felt quite melancholic, actually, whether the main character, Hyeonjun died all alone looking at what he’s achieved. And on the one hand, he’s a hero? I guess? But on the other hand, he’s died all alone. And there’s something quite melancholic about that. And then the following year, it was republished with a paragraph monumentalizing his achievement. So I guess that means that somebody else felt the ending was too sad the way it was.

There has to be a sense that death was worthwhile. The engineer’s sacrifice was worthwhile. But you can read that in many different ways. Sure, from the government’s point of view, they would want his sacrifice to be worthwhile. But I’m pretty sure that if you were going through civil war [the Korean War,] just five years after the Asia Pacific war [WWII], there would be a desire to want to somehow make this worthwhile. That incredible violence and death and the desire for something restorative from it. In that sense, I understand the desire to have these slightly happier endings.

EK: Why is it important to read the North Korean half of the collection without dismissing it as propaganda?

JP: There are so many problems with that. It gives too much credit to political power in a way. He was writing under censorship under Japanese rule, and he clearly found a way to write around it. And so I think we owe it to Choe Myeongik to see how he did that in the North as well.

It’s really important to acknowledge that a writer is grappling with the situation, describing the world, their lives, and their experience just as much as the earlier stuff. I don’t see why the later stories should be dismissed. Terms like “propaganda” or “literature,” which are usually opposed when we talk about North and South Korean literature, clearly come from the Cold War thinking that we’re still embedded in.

Something written in the so-called West or South Korea, or whatever configuration that you’re thinking of, something written there can only be literature and free, whereas something written in North Korea can only be propaganda…. I think that dramatically reduces the complexity of the situation and what writing means. Not to mention, it diminishes the individual achievements of the writers.

I included the long story, “The Barley Hump” (1947) because I felt it was important to look at Choe’s attempt to describe the transition. I couldn’t decide whether to include it or not just because it’s so long.

EK: That was my personal favorite.

JP: I’m glad to hear that because I hesitated a bit. It is important, especially when I live in North America, to understand the desire that went into North Korea, and this is separate from what North Korea is today because I’m not in any way condoning what North Korea is today, but we need to respect that desire for a better society, which comes from a critique of Japanese colonialism.

When I found the final story, “Voices of the Ancestral Land,” (1952) I said, “Wow, here’s a story that’s really describing that experience of being bombed.” We know it happened. It’s all come out over the past few years: The bombs, the evacuee columns…

It’s important to find a written trace of that experience of being in the evacuee line, desperately trying to escape gunfire from American bombers. It’s really important to have that perspective, especially in today’s world where this is still happening. That experience needs to be recognized and affirmed.

EK: You write you translated during Covid in the translator’s note at the end. Illness is a running fact of life inside his stories. Do you think the lockdowns affect your selections of his stories for the collection? Or is it something that just features in his work as a whole?

JP: He is focused on illness, I would say.

It’s like that with the revolutionary too in “Patterns of the Heart”. He’s in some ways, a hopeless addict, but he’s still got more charisma and attraction than the main character. In that time he was living in, there’s somehow a loss of energy or strength or vitality, and these sicker characters paradoxically have more hope and dynamism about them.

The way in which writers often write about 1930s Korea is in the vein of sickness and illness, but I would say that Choe does that more. And he’s also quite graphic and detailed, which is what drew me to his writing in the first place. Compared to other writers at that time, he really, really delves into visual description.

I don’t really imagine Choe Myeongik — I mean, I never knew him — but I don’t imagine him moving a lot. I imagine him in his room with his books like the main character of “Walking in the Rain”.

And in “Patterns of the Heart,” you take the train to Harbin, but then you’re inside that room, that very memorable room. And that also feels very claustrophobic to me. There’s this balance between these really confined spaces where dramas play out, almost like theater, and then these expansive movements. That relationship is present in many of his stories.

EK: You write that Choe Myeongik’s language is really filmic, cinematic. There’s that photographer character in the first short story “Walking in the Rain.” Which of these stories would you like to see made into a screen adaptation?

JP: The filmic just came to me with “Walking in the Rain” because I love the opening section where Choe takes the aerial view and then zooms in and then enters the photographer’s studio. The story asks us right away to think in terms of photography.

I love “Walking in the Rain,” but that feels a bit more like a play than a screen although it is very filmic. “A Man of No Character” could definitely be a film. “Patterns of the Heart” could be a film too, but it would be a bit grim and dark, but it would be interesting.

“Patterns of the Heart” is one of my favorite stories that I especially like to use in classes to think about the figure of the revolutionary and revolutionary dreams, how people talked about Japanese rule, and how the Communist Party was wiped out. But it doesn’t mean that dream did not survive or wasn’t reborn. He shows that in that story. And then of course, the love triangle. Love triangles are always great for moving people along. He likes his love triangles. I always get reading his story is a real sense of expansion of the northern space of northern Korea into Harbin, Manchuria. There’s a real sense of geography that moves with the north Manchurian railway, which enabled relations with different cities such as Harbin.

EK: The title Patterns of the Heart for the collection is very evocative.

JP: ShinMun (心紋) is playing with the Chinese characters. It’s not in service of traditional or neo-traditionalist storytelling. It’s a modern, early 20^th-century tale that involves the railroad and heroin/morphine and a love triangle. And these are very early 20^th-century motifs that he’s using to describe or explore his way of thinking about art.

In many of his stories, he poses art against activism or art against business or the right-wing…There seems to be a constant struggle in versions of art, whether that be literature or painting, against other ways of living life, whether it’s business, making money, being active, maybe even being a revolutionary. Those always seem to be juxtaposed. He’s working through the tension of how to live in his moment.

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