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While South Korea has had enormous success exporting K-Pop, Samsung phones, and LG washing machines, it still lags where “serious” cultural commodities are concerned—like literature. No Korean has ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the government wants to change that. To give Korean literature a boost on the international stage, South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has been pouring millions of dollars into its Korean Literature Translation Institute.
Can the industrial and corporate manufacturing strategies that have been so effective in lifting the country's economy boost its literature, too? Producer Mythili Rao investigates.
Reporting for this story was supported by a fellowship from the International Center for Journalists. A version of this story appears online on The New Yorker’s site.
BROOKE: Amazon is not alone in concluding that unlocking patterns in book sales could open doors to other kinds of domination. It seems the South Korean government has been engaged in a campaign built on a similar idea.
We know South Korea rules when it comes to the global marketing of K-Pop, Samsung phones, and LG washing machines. But it still lags when it comes to “serious” cultural commodities—like literature.
OTM Producer Mythili Rao traveled to Seoul to report on the Ministry of Culture’s new push to make Korean literature a global commodity, and yes, ultimately to win for it, a NOBEL Prize.
BROOKE: Amazon is not alone in concluding that unlocking patterns in book sales could open doors to other kinds of domination. It seems the South Korean government has been engaged in a campaign built on a similar idea.
We know South Korea rules when it comes to the global marketing of K-Pop, Samsung phones, and LG washing machines. But it still lags when it comes to “serious” cultural commodities—like literature.
OTM Producer Mythili Rao traveled to Seoul to report on the Ministry of Culture’s new push to make Korean literature a global commodity, and yes, ultimately to win for it, a NOBEL Prize.
MYTHILI: Hours before the Swedish Academy announced the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was sitting in the office of Brother Anthony of Taize, in the Sinchon district of Seoul.
BROTHER ANTHONY: When I came in 1980 I came as a Brother, a member of our community with other Brothers. We were invited by the Catholic Archbishop.
MYTHILI: Now Brother Anthony is a retired English professor. He’s also a naturalized Korean citizen and a well-regarded translator, perhaps best known for rendering the extensive work of poet Ko Un into English. Ko Un, a monk and former political prisoner, is in his 80s. His many, many volumes of poetry cover everything from daily life to political strife-- and they’ve made him a reliable (if obscure) favorite on unofficial Nobel Prize shortlists.
BROTHER ANTHONY: His name comes out, Ladbrokes, betting, I think he's number 8 this year.
MYTHILI: This year, his odds of winning doubled with the the British betting outfit Ladbrokes in the hours before the announcement was made.
International gamblers love Ko Un. South Koreans, less so.
BROTHER ANTHONY: Koreans can’t understand why Ko Un is a candidate. A lot of Koreans don’t like Ko Un. Part of the problem is that he has published 155 books. Where are you going to start?
MYTHILI: In any case, 2015 was not Ko Un’s year:
“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2015 is awarded to the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich
MYTHILI: Which maybe explains why, three days later, just 50 of the Seoul International Book Festival’s 50,000 attendees showed up to hear the poet speak.
With a GDP of $1.4 trillion, South Korea’s economy is nearly the size of Australia’s or Canada’s. But while Canada and Australia boast twenty-two and thirteen Nobel Laureates each and much smaller countries Luxembourg, East Timor , and Saint Lucia each have 2, South Korea has one. That’s part of the reason why it’s so desperate for a Nobel win.
Ku Minjeong is an editor at Munhakdongne , one of Korea’s biggest publishing houses.
MINJEONG: Korean people tend to obsess over one big thing. Korean people think the Nobel Prize is the best, no other prizes. They think the prize winners are the best writers and their works are the best works in the world.
MYTHILI: I visited her at a literary cafe not far from her office in Paju Book City, a leafy, government-sponsored complex that’s home to facilities for two hundred and fifty publishing houses. The city’s designers say they were inspired to build it after the 1988 Olympics in Seoul as a kind of training facility for producing great books.
If Paju Book City is the training arena for the country’s literary ambitions, the command center is in Gangnam, in the five-story headquarters of the Literary Translation Institute of Korea.
The Institute, run by the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport, has a budget of $10 million and the official goal of boosting Korea’s quote, “national brand value” through literature.
To that end, the LTI trains translators, funds translation projects, sends South Korean writers to festivals and residencies worldwide, and courts American publishers-- like Chad Post of Open Letter press, who was flown out to meet with Korean writers last winter .
POST: They paid for the whole thing and were incredibly generous in every way. // We stayed in this amazing hotel with the best toilet I’ve ever seen in my entire life, the whole thing was wonderful
MYTHILI: Post has worked with translation institutes across the globe.
POST: Denmark’s fantastic, Norway was really good, the German book office is very effective. // The Estonian literature center, the Latvian literature center.
MYTHILI: But he says, South Korea’s efforts stand out
POST: The LTI Korea is a building, like a huge space, and they have a library in there of books that have been fully translated by these translators...that have never been published. It’s just heaps of paper that’s all bound galleys, essentially of these books. //
MYTHILI: as for their efforts to sway the nobel committee?
POST: There’s no way you can influence the committee except by making sure these books exist. And making sure these books exist is that first step to finding a couple of them that break out.
MYTHILI: But there may be a bigger underlying issue stymying Korea’s ambitions.
MONTGOMERY: In order for your literature to be taken seriously internationally it has to be taken seriously domestically. And currently it’s not.
MYTHILI: Charles Montgomery is an English professor at Dongguk University who has lived in Korea for nearly a decade.
MONTGOMERY: you have to remember that economically Korea went from zimbabwe to the 1st world in about 50 years. Koreans think you can go from no prize to the Nobel Prize because they were able to do this economically. They were able to sort of reverse engineer how to make really good projects and products and pow, then they were successful. I would get an LG Washing machine if I were in the US-- I’m sorry GE, the LG Washing machines are better. // And so they tend to think of things in terms of products or units shipped and that’s simply not how literature works.
JUNG BUM HUR: In Korea reading literature is considered extracurricular
MYTHILI: Jung Bum Hur is an advanced translation student at the LTI. His love of literature came in spite of, rather than because of, his Korean education.
JUNG BUM HUR: If you were reading a novel, it was oh, you’re wasting your time. You should be solving math problems, you should be taking another mock exam for the Korean SAT.
MYTHILI: Hur and his classmates take translation seriously. [fade in audio of translation course]. One moment they’re comparing two characters in a short story to Mulder and Scully, the next they’re debating how to most succinctly describe the particular kind of fence used on Korean construction sites in the nineteen-seventies.
JUNG BUM HUR: What I thought what I would do that changes from the story, is that it sort of, the original story goes in and out of quotation marks when the man is telling the story but I decided to separate it into a metadiegetic dialogue, I mean monologue …
MYTHILI: But when it comes to describing the LTI’s efforts, and motives, Hur is cynical.
JUNG BUM HUR: it’s a very good way of a) promoting literature and b) to create some kind of international, to put it crudely, propaganda system, where we can, oh promote Korea through our literature. Like Korean literature is K-Pop or something.
MYTHILI: To its credit, the LTI has worked hard to discern what global audiences want. Recent works it’s supported and translated include some decidedly grim titles like Nowhere to Be Found, Lonesome You, At Least We Can Apologize, and No One Writes Back. These aren’t sunny, patriotic tales. For example, No One Writes Back is the story of an orphaned vagabond. At one point the lonely narrator reflects on books, saying “ I do wonder what the difference is between novels and things such mackerels sold at the marketplace.” He concludes that there’s no shame in being a literary salesman. “You can’t sell your own works without being passionate about yourself,” he says.
And in a way, Korea’s quest for a Nobel-- is a deeply passionate enterprise, with its own pressures and guilt. Novelist Jeong I-hyeon, who writes about the romantic and professional lives of Korean women told me, for example, that though her books actually sell, she’s pretty sure she’ll never win a Nobel-- and she feels like she’s letting her country down.
JEONG I-HYEON: I somehow feel as if I have done something wrong. I guess not something wrong, but I feel sorry? I’m not the author who can win a Nobel prize and deliver on that kind of happiness.
MYTHILI: But even if LTI’s quest for Nobel greatness fails, for the first time, American readers curious about Korean life now have dozens of dark, complex, newly-translated novels and short stories to choose from.
Brother Anthony hopes that LTI will keep searching for that break out success.
BROTHER ANYTHONY: The biggest problem they have really is that they are under the ministry, their government organization therefore there are under audit and inspection from the National Assembly, a nasty body and the National Assembly (like a lot of Koreans) only knows, only thinks in quantity. And has no idea of quality.
MONTGOMERY: I’m afraid if Ko Un wins, the Korean government, the LTI just declare victory and shut down.
MYTHILI: Charles Montgomery.
MONTGOMERY: We did it! Yay! We’re the Usain Bolt of literature! We’re out!
The best thing that could happen to South Korean literature? It just might be not winning a Nobel.
For On the Media, I’m Mythili Rao
BROOKE: Reporting for this story was supported by a fellowship from the International Center for Journalists. A version of this story appears online on The New Yorker’s site.