Why Korean Literature?

In October 2024 the Nobel Prize in Literature went to a Korean writer for the first time. Most readers of this course will meet Korean literature the way the committee's English-speaking audience did: through a translation. This chapter sets out what the course covers, how the sources divide the subject, what translation changes, and how to tell record from legend before the chapters begin.

What Counts as Korean Literature?

The article's lead says Korean literature "is commonly divided into classical and modern periods, although this distinction is sometimes unclear." It also says "For much of Korea's 1,500 years of literary history, it was written in Hanja", the Chinese characters. So the first thing to know is that writing in Korea has meant writing in more than one script and, for a long time, in more than one language. Chapter 3 covers that story in full; the script itself is the subject of Korean Alphabet 1.

The article lists what it covers:

• Oral literature: ballads, legends, mask plays, puppet-show texts and pansori (storytelling in song), defined as texts transmitted orally before Hangul existed.
• Poetic forms: hyangga, the Goryeo songs (byeolgok and changga), sijo and gasa, plus short-lived forms.
• Prose: myths, legends and folktales, literary miscellany, and fiction in Chinese and in Korean.
• History in order: early Joseon (including Yongbi eocheonga), late Joseon, modern literature, Japanese rule (1910 to 1945) and national division.

The Course at a Glance

Scope

The course follows the rule for the Korea courses: South Korea first, and the whole peninsula for the periods before the 1945 and 1948 division. The Korean literature article treats North and South Korea under separate headings with separate main articles. It says post-war South Korean literature often addresses ordinary people's lives and national pain, that some North Korean writers are appreciated in the South, and that both Koreas held a joint literary congress in 2005. It also mentions that the poet Cho Ki-chon moved to North Korea, with no detail. It says nothing about North Korean literary policy, so Chapter 7 will carry only a short, factual note, drawn from open sources, and no more.

Reading in Translation

Almost everything in this course is read in English, so one fact belongs at the start: you are always reading a translator's choices. The sources give a few markers of how that field has grown.

• The older direction. The article says "the earliest modern Korean translation of a fiction work" was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, translated into Korean by James Scarth Gale and his wife Gibson in 1895. That is translation into Korean, not out of it. The article's footnote also mentions an 1885 manuscript, Corean Tales, which it describes as "western-influenced" and not a translation, so I do not treat it as a counter-example.
• Early English anthologies. It names Flowers of Fire (1974) as one of the first English anthologies and says translation quality and range have improved. A claim that literature in English was largely ignored until the 1980s is tagged "citation needed", so I report it only as the article's.
• Other languages. It says the translation institute has promoted translations into German, Spanish, French and Polish.

The institute behind many translations

The Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) is, per its article, a South Korean nonprofit founded in 1996 by the government "with the aim of promoting Korean literature and culture overseas". It began as the Korean Literature Translation Fund, was renamed a translation institute in 2001, became a special corporation in 2005 and was placed under the Literature Promotion Act in 2016. It lists:

• Translation grants, each quarter, for fiction, poetry, plays, nonfiction, children's and young adult books, genre fiction and graphic novels. Since 2014 it first funds a sample translation, and the rest of the money follows once the translator and author sign a deal with an international publisher.
• Publication grants to foreign publishers who have bought rights to works translated with its support.
• Forums abroad, the Seoul International Writers' Festival every other year, translation academies in seven languages, a public library (opened 2007) and an English magazine, Korean Literature Now, with a circulation of about 5,000.

The article's figures come mostly from 2010 to 2012 sources and several of its links are dead, so I give them as history, not as the institute's current size. My reading, and not a claim in the article: because a state-funded body helps choose and pay for translations, what reaches English readers is partly shaped by that funding. The sources say who is supported and how; they do not say what is left out.

A Recent Case: Han Kang

Two things for the course. First, the Booker was shared by the translator, which shows how the book arrives in English through a second author's work. Second, the article names more than one translator across her books (Deborah Smith for three of them, and different translators for Greek Lessons and We Do Not Part), so the English "voice" of one author is more than one person's. I do not compare translations; I did not read them.

Record and Legend

As in the course on Korean screens, the habit is to ask what a claim rests on. The article offers several useful examples:

• Early histories. It gives Samguk sagi (1146) and Samguk yusa (1285) as dates, with a "citation needed" tag on that sentence.
• What survives. Of the hyangga, only 25 survive: 14 in the Samguk yusa and 11 in another source, the Gyunyeojeon. The count is the article's.
• The first Hangul text. It presents Yongbi eocheonga (125 cantos) as "the first piece of Korean text to depart from a long history reliant on Chinese characters."
• Firsts. It calls Kim Sisup's Kŭmo sinhwa the "first known" classical Korean fiction, a hedged phrase, and says sijo "are thought to have been popular with common people".
• Censorship. A claim that uncensored Korean publishing became impossible once the Government-General took over the newspaper Taehan Maeil Shinbo (July 1904 to May 1909) carries a "citation needed" tag.
• Pansori. It says five pansori texts survive, from twelve madang.

The habits for this course: separate what survives from what is described; treat "first" as a claim; and say whether a date, a count or an attribution is tagged.

Where to Read

I have not checked which of the works named in this course are available in English, in which edition or in which library. The articles name translators for only a few, so I give titles in English where the sources do and the Korean title alongside. Your public library catalogue, and a bookshop's translated-fiction shelf, are better guides than my memory; the LTI Korea article says its own library opened to the public in 2007, but I did not check whether it can be used from the United Kingdom.

Exercises

Next chapter: Myths, Songs and the Early Kingdoms.