The concubine of the wife
I’ve been translating a short story at the request of a friend of mine. The friend is Young-Key Kim-Renaud, a retired professor of linguistics at George Washington University. But more importantly, she is the daughter of Han Moo-sook, a famous short story writer.
Kim-Renaud is compiling an anthology of her mother’s short stories in English translation. Some of the stories have already been translated, but she wants to translate them all, apparently. She is asking dozens of her friends to each translate one story.
The one the we decided I should translate is titled “Yi Sajong’s Wife.” It is a story that looks at a famous piece of folklore from Korean history — I do not know if the story is true or not, but it is presented as a true incident — centered on a famous love story of the most famous gisaeng in Korea, Hwang Jini. The story goes that Hwang Jini fell in love with a man who was a great singer. He was out in the mountains, singing, and she heard him and presented herself to him. She was captured by his beautiful singing, and as it turns out he was a famous singer of the time, the mid-16th century. His name was Yi Sajong.
That Yi was married was not an obstacle to the two of them deciding that they should have a love affair, but no cheap one-night stand for these folks — they decided that she would be his concubine, but not forever, which was usually the case for a concubine, but for six years — they would spend three years at his home in Seoul, then — fair is fair — three years at her home in Gaeseong. And so it was. A famous love story with a long, short-term arrangement unique in the world of sexual misconduct.
What then of the wife of Yi Sajong? That is the grist of the mill for Han’s story. How did Yi Sajong’s wife take to this concubine. And she was no ordinary concubine — she was the most famous of all gisaeng.
The short story is presented as a series of letters written by Yi Sajong’s wife to her maternal grandmother. And thus we see things not from the perspective of a man who becomes the lover of a famous gisaeng, the most famous gisaeng, but we see the story from the betrayed wife, and, indirectly from the perspective of that woman’s ally, her grandmother.
As the story unfolds, we see the wife of Yi Sajong greatly respects her grandmother, but as the letters unfold, the grandmother was also the victim of an unfaithful husband who took in a concubine. So Yi Sajong’s wife, in praising the virtue of her grandmother, we find, she is looking for the virtue she needs in her own life, too, to deal with another woman in the household. The concubine is not just the concubine of the husband, but becomes the concubine of the wife — she has to deal with her, too.
In each of the letters the wife of Yi Sajong reveals the emotions she feels, and the layers of emotions that unfold as she deals with betrayal and loss of love of her husband.
At the same time, she deals with the fact that Hwang Jini is overwhelmingly alluring. A woman of great beauty and also great intelligence and talent. She can sing, she can dance, she can write poems, and in this story we find out she can cook and take care of a man. In describing Hwang Jini the story recounts several of her sijo poetry. In the process, we see the sijo written to one man, known by his pen name as Byeokkaesu, was overwhelmingly tempting. It alone would have tempted most men to succumb to the wiles of this famous gisaeng. But we find out that he does not succumb, which paints Yi Sajong in even worse light, because Yi does succumb. Not everyone does, not to the greatest temptress of all time. But the wife of Yi Sajong finds that her husband falls into the clutches of Hwang Jini.
And that seems to be the message of the story. Hwang Jini is portrayed in the most glamorous way. Her beauty is described, and the incidents around her show how powerful she is. She has wealth, and a home of her own — not the home of a man. And she writes great poems that we see them one at a time as the story unfolds.
Author Han Moosook seems to admire Hwang Jini, as all students of Korean culture do, but she brings us up short, pointing out the betrayal, the infidelity, the hurt, the pain, of the woman for whom Hwang Jini is the “other woman.” It would be perverse to say Yi Sajong’s wife is the “other woman” — hers is the original perspective. Hwang Jini is the “other woman!”
The story is loaded with Korean culture and history. Lots and lots of arcane historical concepts and language. A beast to translate, with a load of archaic terms, but a deep and enlightening perspective on Korean culture centuries ago.
Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.