한국국제교류재단

“Nobody Checks the Time When They’re Happy” is Eun Heekyung’s second collection of short stories, first published in Korean in 1999. The seven short stories depict the lives of a variety of characters in diverse situations, but there are some common threads woven through the narratives. Two of the most prominent threads are mentioned in the title of the collection (and the third story): time and happiness.

Time is a spectrum, running from the past through the ephemeral present and to the unknowable future. While the stories here do give us glimpses into the characters’ present lives, much of the time is devoted to their past and future. This is not unusual in fiction, of course, but Eun uses these temporal shifts to examine the ways we know and understand our past and future, and the problems inherent in those epistemological methods. We cannot know our past other than through our memories, and memories often prove imperfect. In the titular story, a young woman tries to reckon with the past by looking through countless photo albums. Her lover - himself but a memory now - is baffled at this impulse to capture the past. “It’s not like the past can serve as an alibi,” he explains. At the end of “The Age of Lyricism,” a successful writer realizes that the only consequence of mixing up her memories would be having a different story to write. Memory is a central theme in “The Other Side of the World” as well, portrayed as almost a physical thing that might be excised with a pocket knife or weigh one down as a burden. This burden of memory can be incredibly heavy; one of the young men in “Summer is Fleeting” even defends his forgetfulness as a survival instinct.

But time moves in both directions, and we can know even less about our future than we can about our past. All that we have are our hopes and dreams.

In commenting on the central tragedy in “Bruise,” one character tells another, “That’s life. Dreams disappear, journeys become too long.” The final story in the collection, “In My Life,” has even more to say about dreams: “When you have a dream, it makes you come alive. It’s almost as if it gives your life reason.” Whether or not this dream is attainable is beside the point; it is the mere act of looking to a brighter future that has meaning.

Yet the dreams of the characters in this book as well as the others lead inevitably to disappointment and sorrow, and here we find the second thread woven into the tapestry. The owner of the bar called “In My Life” has no time for those who are happy, claiming that people are only interesting - and only worthy of being characters in a story - if they are sad. The young woman in the titular story, struggling with the suicide of her lover, sees only despair in her future.

There is one telling passage in “Summer is Fleeting,” in which the author comments, albeit at a remove and through unsympathetic characters, on the sorrow and pain that pervades this collection. The young male narrator talks to his two male friends about books he has read, noting that, unlike men who write “dreamy prose [that] fills an entire world,” women write “a chilling record of the emptiness of life,” prose that is “biting and relentless,” or “lucid accounts of immense pain and terrible suffering.” No doubt we are meant to take this criticism with a grain of salt. But reading deeper, we can see that it is sorrow that makes the characters come alive. In the end, their sorrow might be the most beautifully human thing about them.

“Premodern Korean Literary Prose: An Anthology” brings together a wide variety of works ranging from before the Goryeo period (918-1392) to the late Joseon period (1392-1910). The editors recognized the difficulty of putting together an anthology, grappling with the questions of what to include and what to exclude. After a survey of existing anthologies in both Korean and English, they decided to focus on those genres that had received little to no attention in existing collections, attempting to present a fuller and more accurate picture of what Koreans from all walks of life were both writing and reading.

The anthology begins with some early prose forms to show the historical development of Korean prose writing. Other types of writing include the so-called pseudo-biographies - fictional works that take a non-human subject, such as money or malt, and personify it in order to comment on the issues of human life - and commentaries on various social issues. Also present are a selection of unofficial histories - short tales that offer a different perspective on history from that seen in official s and records - as well as autobiographies, social commentaries and philosophical humor.

Finally, the collection ends with excerpts from three pansoriworks from the field of oral literature. In reality, the fields of oral and written literature are far more intertwined than one might suspect based on their treatment elsewhere; not only do the excerpts here function to bridge that gap, they have been translated by Chan E. Park, herself a pansori singer, and thus offers a true taste of their flavor as oral performances. As a whole, this volume will help fill the gaps in premodern Korean literature available in English.

The website for the Oegyujanggak Uigwe, d by the National Museum of Korea, is a digitized collection of uigwe, records of state events and rites of the Joseon Dynasty that contain detailed explanations and illustrations. The elaborate s were designed to serve as both historical records and manuals for future events.

The Oegyujanggak was built in 1782 on Ganghwa Island as a secure storehouse for the most important s in the royal library, Gyujanggak. However, when France attacked Korea in 1866 in retaliation for the execution of French Catholic priests, they plundered this “outer” royal library and took nearly 300 volumes of uigwe back to France. Efforts to secure their return began in the early 1990s, but the uigwe only returned home in 2011.

This website is now home to all of the 297 repatriated royal books. Readers not familiar with literary Chinese, in which all official s of the Joseon Dynasty were written, may find the “Procession Illustrations” (Banchado) more illuminating. This is a selection of the long, detailed illustrations of royal processions, with English explanations for each of them. Finally, the “3D Royal Procession,” although not translated into English, brings to life the funeral procession of Queen Jangnyeol in 1688.