Earticle

This study undertakes a thorough examination of Kevin O’Rourke’s (1939– 2020) translations of sijo (時調), with a particular emphasis on the form of the traditional Korean poetry. The study has a four-fold purpose. First, it explores O’Rourke’s five-line format for rendering the traditional sijo into English. To illustrate distinctive features of this format, I compare his rendition of Hwang Chini’s sijo “Tongjit tal kinagin pam ŭl” (동짓달 기나긴 밤을) with a number of English versions by other translators. Second, I compare three sijo formats (including the five-line format) that O’Rourke utilized at different stages of his career as a translator. This diachronic analysis reveals significant shifts in how O’Rourke felt the traditional sijo should be structured in English. Third, the study deals with three potential problems with the five-line format, namely a visual mismatch between the original and its translation, a susceptibility to editing errors, and variability in e-book viewers. To explore these issues, I provide a detailed examination of O’Rourke’s translations of a number of sijo poems written by Kim Sujang, Chŏng Ch’ŏl, and Hwang Chini. Finally, I analyze O’Rourke’s rendering of the fourth line of translated sijo, which corresponds to the first three syllables of the final chang of the original sijo. This micro-level analysis demonstrates how and to what extent he adjusted the syllable counts of the fourth lines. I conclude with a brief discussion of the wider implications and limitations of O’Rourke’s translation approach.

This study examines the meaning of the imaginative geography created by contact with communist countries and the prospects for a post-Cold War world. It analyzes newspaper articles, TV documentaries, and the written travelogue about Richard E. Kim’s (Korean name Kim Ŭn’guk 金恩國) travels to China and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. During this time, neither China nor the Soviet Union had established diplomatic ties with South Korea, and they were not regions in which Koreans could travel freely. As such, the Korean public’s perception of communist countries was somewhat limited. However, as a U.S. citizen, Kim could travel to these countries, and his travels subsequently received significant attention from the South Korean public. Kim gave accounts of his travels in newspapers and books and on TV, but the interpretations of these trips differed according to the medium. Newspapers and documentaries represented the communist countries and the lives of ethnic Koreans according to Cold War Orientalism and emphasized nationalist identity, while Kim’s travelogue departed from both Cold War Orientalism and nationalist identity. Kim’s approach emphasized differences that could not be unified and presented a desirable subjectivity for the upcoming post-Cold War era. In sum, while the documentaries highlighted nationalism, Kim’s travel writing suggested a cosmopolitan subjectivity, two perspectives that differed radically in their prospects for the future.

Previous research on maternal filicide has noted a lack of resources and mental illness as important causal factors. Although most scholars accept that filicide should be understood in an appropriate cultural context, the processes by which macro-level structures such as culture and ideology are embodied in the situated behaviors of offenders and victims have been insufficiently explored. This paper explores maternal filicide in Korea from 1948 to 1962. It finds that cultural factors unique to mid-twentieth century Korea, such as polygyny and shame, influenced the characteristics of maternal filicide in ways that differentiate it from the West.

This study adopts a comparative literary approach to two well-known poems composed in Korean and English, respectively: “Tugyŏn” (The cuckoo) by Kim Yŏngnang (金永郞) and “Ode to a Nightingale” by the English Romantic poet John Keats. In both poems the solitary speaker is responding to the bird’s song, but an intertextual reading of the two works reveals far more than this obvious similarity in the ways that deepen our understanding of their texts. Densely intertextual in itself, the text of each poem is a mixture of earlier texts which include the works of literature, historical sources, and literary or cultural conventions. Moreover, the relationship of “The Cuckoo” to the Nightingale ode proves explicitly intertextual. The third stanza of “The Cuckoo,” in particular, seems to have been produced in reaction to the seventh stanza of “Nightingale.” The imagistic structure of the former parallels that of the latter in that three successive scenes in each stanza feature different auditors (some of them being historical and literary figures) hearing the music of the bird. As illustrated by the depictions of Ruth and Ch’unhyang, a creative side do both of Keats’s and Yŏngnang’s dependence on other texts in the composition process have. In addition, the relationship between aspirations to death and the experience of beauty turns out to be paradoxical in both poems, which is an effect of intertextuality. While engaging creatively and intertextually in Keats’s ode, Yŏngnang evolved a ‘pure’ lyric style that laid the foundation for modern Korean poetry.

This study analyzes the methods Imperial Japan employed in changing the names of Korean territories and examines how these changes related to the policies of the colonial power. The Japanese photo album Hantō no kin’ei depicts a variety of landscapes in colonial Korea. It also contains tables of contents in both Japanese and English, whose primary purpose was to Romanize Korean place names (generally written in Chinese characters) based on their Japanese pronunciation. This study argues that in order to superimpose its identity onto Korea, Japan transliterated Korean place names based on Japanese pronunciation rather than the original Korean. Through this strategy, Japan laid claim to such areas and made manifest its territorial expansion.

This study aims to provide an in-depth examination of the radio dramas Obal Ch’unhyangjŏn (誤發 春香傳, 1964–1965) and Sŏul Ch’unhyangjŏn (서울 春香傳, 1965), produced by Tonga Pangsong (DBS) during the 1960s, the golden age of Korean radio drama. The paper will analyze how these radio dramas reflect the contemporary South Korean society, considering their relationship with the classic Ch’unhyangjŏn (春香傳). The dramas followed the style of existing Ch’unhyangjŏn parodies—the cartoon Modŏn Ch’unhyangjŏn (모던 春香傳, 1932–1933) and the novels T’alsŏn Ch’unhyangjŏn (脫線 春香傳, 1951) and Nairon Ch’unhyangjŏn (나이론 春香傳, 1954). Although their titles differ, Obal Ch’unhyangjŏn and Sŏul Ch’unhyangjŏn are the first and second parts of a single work by the dramatist Yi Yongch’an. The former tells the story of Ch’unhyang and Mongnyong from their first meeting to their wedding, whereas the latter continues their story after the wedding. These dramas are particularly noteworthy as they were extremely popular and inspired many more contemporary dramatizations of Korean classics by DBS. Yi retained the narrative structure of the classic Ch’unhyangjŏn and shifted the historical background to the 1960s in an attempt to satirize the contemporary money-dominated South Korean society and provide hope for overcoming it through a new Ch’unhyang figure. Notably, the heroine of his radio dramas is a much more confident and independent figure than the classic Ch’unhyang. These dramas held significance not only as the pioneering modern dramatizations of Ch’unhyangjŏn but also for resonating with the contemporary audience through a modern reinterpretation of this classic literary work.

This article examines the poem “Colossal Roots” (거대한 뿌리, 1964) by Kim Suyŏng and his translation of selected passages from the book Korea and Her Neighbours (1897) by Isabella Bird Bishop. The analysis is from a postcolonial perspective, drawing upon Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of the third space, enunciation, mimicry, and hybridity. The article argues that Kim’s work can be understood as an act of enunciation in the third space, as he questions and undermines the Orientalist prejudices that Bird promotes. Through mimicking Bird’s Orientalist gaze, he challenges and subverts the Orientalist stereotypes she perpetuates and situates himself in a space where the remnants of Japanese colonial rule, the new hegemonic power of the U.S., and North and South Korea converge. The article presents a fresh perspective on the controversy surrounding tradition and Orientalism, particularly examining the paradox inherent in the famous line from “Colossal Roots,” “Traditions, no matter how filthy, are good,” and the shift in perspective that Kim experiences during his translation of Korea and Her Neighbours.

Widely called the “hermit kingdom,” North Korea is one of the most reclusive countries in the world. In particular, for South Korea, although its past and present are deeply entwined with North Korea, physical access to the country is strictly denied. This study focuses on how contemporary South Korean artists have constructed North Korea as a liminal space in which reality and fiction, past and present collide. It analyzes contemporary artworks that attempt to de-border the other Korea. These works include Kwon Hayoun’s Model Village (2014), a video centered on a reconstruction of an uninhabited North Korean propaganda village on the edge of the DMZ, and Park Chan-kyong’s Sets (2000), a series of slides of a North Korean film studio that recreated the streets of Seoul and a South Korean movie set that included a replica of P’anmunjŏm. Based on the unique relationship between the two Koreas, the paper argues that contemporary South Korean art embodies the elusive reality of North Korea that defies the clear understanding of its truth. In addition, it shows that the ambiguous representation of North Korea is a compelling reminder of the long history of national division and the psychological and physical distance between the two Koreas. This de-bordering expands the epistemological frame through which to perceive Korea beyond that of a binary Cold War order framework.