 Heidrun Kang, recipient of this year’s Daesan Literature Award / Korea Times |
Heidrun Kang, 72, the recipient of this year’s Daesan Literature Award for translating Kim Hoon’s “The Song of the Sword” into German with Ahn So-hyeon, 51, started translating Korean literature quite late. At the STAR Korea AG office, a technical translation agency, in Mapo-gu, Seoul, where she serves as a CEO, Kang told The Korea Times her long pondered thoughts on Korean culture and the literature scene.
Since she first came to Korea with her Korean husband in the 1960s, she has held various positions as a lecturer, fulltime professor, and even a principal at a German school in Seoul. It wasn’t until 1993 that Kang and Ahn won first prize by translating late Korean writer Park Wan-suh’s short story “Heat Stroke Bus” in a competition run by the East Berlin Publishing Company. The duo has been translating Korean literature into German ever since. For Kim Hoon’s novel, the pair worked sentence by sentence for a year and a half. “In the beginning I was so upset by so many chapters with all these sunsets. But when the translation was finished, it all made sense in the context of the novel. I was very agreeably surprised when I read the complete work for pleasure.”
Kang says even after almost 18 years, she still finds translating Korean literature challenging because of the almost cryptic vocabulary and lack of appropriate dictionaries. Kang categorized Korean into three groups: everyday, journalistic and literary. According to Kang, Korean writers give endless descriptions of facial expressions and gestures to characterize people, an ironic style given that Koreans do not carry overt facial expression in general. Kang personally enjoys the condensed and compressed writings of Yi Mun-yol and Kim Hoon that do not have such lengthy descriptions and leave something to the readers’ imagination.
Though Korean readers markedly prefer novels, Kang thinks Korean writers are exceptional in short stories and essays, which might reflect the fast-paced life here. To develop a plot with multiple characters for a novel, one has to construct continuity. “I don’t think we or the writers have the time to experience that in Korea, our experiences are more segmented,” Kang speculated. She also noted that while German readers, especially young women, read detective novels, the genre is not popular in Korea.
Unfortunately Korean literature is undervalued in Germany and remains a niche market, especially compared to Japanese works which are quite well accepted. Kang believes that more publishers should promote Korean literature aggressively abroad, and more financial support for translating Korean books is crucial. Fortunately, Kang and her partner Kim Hui-yeol’s translation of Yi Mun-yol’s “Our Twisted Hero” was well-received in Germany. Titled “Der Entstellte Held,” the story about teenagers’ power dynamics in school with a political subtext, was published not only in hard cover but also paperback.
Having witnessed Korea since the 1960s, Kang noted that Korean culture changes too fast. “Too many things get lost so quickly. I wonder if the younger generation has this sense of continuity and understands where Korea comes from,” she said. She believes Korea is too eager to brand itself with “hallyu,” or the Korean wave, with too much focus on K-pop. She recounted her German friends who visited Korea and wanted to see prints of orchid paintings by Lee Ha-eung, a royal artist from the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910). Though the paintings are regarded as proud relics of Korean history, she could not find any at the National Museum of Korea nor at the National Folk Museum of Korea. Kang thinks modern Korea, in its attempt to sever itself from the prevailing image of war and a separated country, should not ignore its rich history but take advantage of it.
