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WORK TITLE: A Greater Music
WORK whereTES: trans by Deborah Smith
PSEUDONYM(S): Suah, Bae; Bae, Suah
BIRTHDATE: 1965
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Korean
Family name is Bae; given name is Suah. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bae_Suah * http://koreanliteraturenow.com/%EC%9E%91%EA%B0%80/bae-suah * https://deepvellum.org/authors/bae-suah/
RESEARCHER NOTES: NOTE: SHE LIVES IN GERMANY–DP
PERSONAL
Born 1965.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and translator. Formerly South Korean government employee at the Gimpo Airport, Incheon, South Korea.
AWARDS:Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize, 2003; Tongseo Literary Prize, 2004.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Fiction and Philosophy. Short story “Time in Gray” translated as a standalone volume by Chang Chung-hwa and Andrew James Keast for ASIA Publishers’ Bilingual Edition Modern Korean Literature Series, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
A former government worker in a South Korean airport, Bae Suah made her literary debut with a short story titled “The Dark Room of Nineteen Eighty-Eight.” Suah has since written short story collections and novels. Such, who lives and studies German in Germany, is also a translator of books in German, including works by Franz Kafka and W.G. Seabald. Suah’s first novel to be translated into English by Sora Kim-Russell is Nowhere to Be Found, which was long listed for the 2015 PEN Translation award.
A Greater Music
Suah’s novel titled A Greater Music revolves around an unamed Korean writer who has returned to Berlin after three years in South Korea. She has returned to house sit for a former lover and take care of the dog. “The visit becomes a “continuation of a dream” for the narrator,” noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. Literary Review Online contributor Gretchen McCullough remarked: “A Greater Music circles around a series of poetic flashbacks, like musical movements, rather than following a conventional linear plot.”
Early in the novel, the writer falls into into an icy river and realizes she is likely drowning. “The narrator feels as if she were in a dream – observing herself with detachment, yet acutely aware,” wrote Literary Review Online contributor McCullough. One thought that passes through the writer’s mind is that it is ironic that she is going to die before her former lover, M, who was always so sickly. Meanwhile, as she tries to catch her breath, the writer reflects on what has led her to this day while contemplating the broader meaning to life, or the greater music.
The writer recalls her past time in Germany three years earlier when she came from South Korea to study German literature and language. To help her learn German, the writer hired a tutor named M. The writer and M both share a love of literature and classical music, leading them to become lovers. Meanwhile, this time in Germany the writer is staying with Joachim, another love interest. Although the two spend time together like a couple, they show little sign of affection for each other. However, it is obvious the writer has deep affections for M even though the writer broke of the relationship.
“By analyzing this intense relationship through the lenses of music, literature, and language, the narrator slowly exposes us to the unraveling of this love affair and her resulting sense of shame and regret,” noted World Literature Today contributor Melissa Beck. Asymptote Web site contributor Houman Barekat remarked: “Deborah Smith’s crisp, taut translation renders Bae’s voice in a curtly diaristic register that neatly complements the protagonist’s predicament. There is an almost total absence of warmth, and such humour as we get is sardonic and distinctly bitter; it is a vivid rendering, in short, of the sense of impotence and claustrophobia that comes with finding oneself in a foreign country without the tools—the cultural capital —to adapt and feel at home.”
Recitation
In her novel titled Recitation, also translated by Deborah Smith, Suah tells the story of Kyung-hee, who become an international, vagabond traveler after breaking her foot during an acting performance. Middle aged and divorced, Kyung-hee uses her travels to visit friends and acquaintances in various cities, mostly European, occasionally returning to Seoul to narrate audiobooks and make some money to continue her travels.”Recitation’s initial chapters are somewhat reminiscent in style and plot elements of A Greater Music, noted New York Journal of Books Web site contributor David Cooper, pointing out that the protagonists in both novels like classical music. Cooper also notes that the unnamed writer in A Greater Music had a German music teacher named M while Kyung-hee’s former German teacher is Maria.
Kyung-hee’s encounters are typically with people who go nameless, as her story is told by some Koreans immigrants who find her stranded one night at a European train station.Throughout the novel, Kyung-hee’s encounters are with people only described in broader terms, such as the teacher couple and the East Asian man. The only person whose name is revealed is Maria. As the novel progresses, it becomes clearer that all the people Kyung-hee meets are connected in some way, as people she meets introduces her to various other people. It is through Marie that Hyung-hee becomes associated with global dwellers who have no real home and have formed a kind of community named Karakoram.
“Suah’s book ends on a vague note which is fitting for the rest of the narrative in which time, places and characters oftentimes blend together and become blurred,” wrote a contributor to the Book Binder’s Daughter Web site, adding: “Kyung-hee herself becomes a shadow of a figure.” New York Review of Books Web site contributor Cooper noted: “The enigma of Kyung-hee’s literal identity and very existence is central to the novel’s final section where Bae demands the most challenging mental work of her readers, which may call to mind the East Asian man’s explanation of Borges’ negation of time.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, August 1, 2016, Terry Hong, review of A Greater Music, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, August 22, 2016, review of A Greater Music, p. 83.
World Literature Today, November-December, 2016, Melissa Beck, review of A Greater Music, p. 72.
ONLINE
Asymptote, http://www.asymptotejournal.com/ (May 3, 2017), Houman Barekat, review of A Greater Music.
Book Binder’s Daughter, https://thebookbindersdaughter.com/ (February 2, 2017), review of Recitation.
Korean Literature Now, http://koreanliteraturenow.com/ (May 19, 2017), brief author profile.
Literary Review Online, http://www.theliteraryreview.org/ (May 3, 2017), Gretchen McCullough, review of A Greater Music.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (May 19, 2017), David Cooper, review of Recitation.
White Review Online, http://www.thewhitereview.org/ (May 19, 2017), Deborah Smith and White Review staff, “Interview with Bae Suah.”*
Bae Suah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bae Suah
Baesuah.jpg
Born 1965 (age 51–52)
Occupation Author, translator
Language Korean, German
Nationality South Korean
Ethnicity Korean
Genre Fiction
Bae Suah
Hangul 배수아
Revised Romanization Bae Sua
McCune–Reischauer Pae Sua
This article contains Korean text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Hangul and Hanja.
This is a Korean name; the family name is Bae.
Bae Suah (born 1965) is a South Korean author and translator. [1]
Contents
1 Life
2 Work
3 Selected Works
4 Awards
5 References
Life
Bae graduated from Ewha Womans University with a degree in Chemistry. At the time of her debut in 1993, she was a government employee working behind the embarkation/disembarkation desk at Gimpo Airport in Incheon. Without formal instruction or guidance from a literary mentor, Bae wrote stories as a hobby.[2] But it wasn’t long before she left her stultifying job to become one of the most daringly unconventional writers to grace the Korean literary establishment in modern years.[3]
She made her debut as a writer with A Dark Room in 1988. Bae stayed in Germany for 11 months between 2001 and 2002, where she began learning German.[4] and has since
Work
Bae has departed from the tradition of mainstream literature and created her own literary world based on a unique style and knack for psychological description.[5]
Bae made her debut as a writer with A Dark Room in 1988. Since then, she has published two anthologies of short fiction, including the novella Highway With Green Apples. She has also published novels, including Rhapsody in Blue.[6] Her work is regarded as unconventional in the extreme, including such unusual topics as men becoming victims of domestic violence by their female spouses (in “Sunday at the Sukiyaki Restaurant”).[7] characterized by tense-shifting and alterations in perspective. Her most recent works are nearly a-fictional, decrying characterization and plot.[8]
Bae is known for her use of abrupt shifts in tense and perspective, sensitive yet straightforward expressions, and seemingly non sequitur sentences to unsettle and distance her readers. Bae’s works offer neither the reassurance of moral conventions upheld, nor the consolation of adversities rendered meaningful. Most of her characters harbor traumatic memories from which they may never fully emerge, and their families, shown to be in various stages of disintegration, only add to the sense of loneliness and gloom dominating their lives. A conversation between friends shatters the idealized vision of love; verbal abuse constitutes a family interaction; and masochistic self-loathing fills internal monologues. The author’s own attitude toward the world and the characters she has created is sardonic at best.[9]
Selected Works
• Highway with Green Apples (푸른 사과가 있는 국도) (1995). Translated by Sora Kim-Russell for the December 18, 2013 of "Day One", a digital literary journal by Amazon Publishing[10]
• Rhapsody in Blue (랩소디 인 블루) (1995).
• Cheolsu (철수) (1998). Translated by Sora Kim-Russell as Nowhere to Be Found, AmazonCrossing, 2015.[11]
• Ivana (이바나) (2002).
• Sunday at the Sukiyaki Restaurant (일요일 스키야키 식당) (2003).
• The Essayist's Desk (에세이스트의 책상) (2003). Translated by Deborah Smith as A Greater Music, Open Letter, 2016.
• Solitary Scholar (독학자) (2004).
• Hul (훌) (2006). Includes the short story Time in Gray (회색時), translated as a standalone volume by Chang Chung-hwa (장정화) and Andrew James Keast for ASIA Publishers’ Bilingual Edition Modern Korean Literature Series, 2013; and the short story Towards Marzahn (낯선 천국으로의 여행), translated by Annah Overly as "Toward Marzahn," 2014.[12]
• North-Facing Living Room (북쪽 거실) (2009).
• The Owls' Absence (올빼미의 없음) (2010). Translated by Deborah Smith for Open Letter, 2017.
• The Low Hills of Seoul (서울의 낮은 언덕들) (2011). Translated by Deborah Smith as Recitation, Deep Vellum, 2017.
• Inscrutable Nights and Days (알려지지 않은 밤과 하루) (2013). Translated by Deborah Smith but no publisher.
Awards
• Dongseo Literary Prize, 2004
• Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize, 2003
Bae Suah made her literary debut in 1993 in the quarterly Fiction and Philosophy with “The Dark Room of Nineteen Eighty-Eight.” She is the author of the short story collection Green Apples Along the Highway (2002), and the novella Nowhere to Be Found (1998), and the novels Sunday Sukiyaki Restaurant (2003), North Living Room (2009), and Untold Nights and a Day (2013).
Bae Suah (b. 1965) is a highly acclaimed contemporary Korean author, and has been described as “one of the most radical and experimental writers working in Korea today.” After making her literary debut in 1993 with the short story “The Dark Room of Nineteen Eighty-Eight”, she went on to pen several novels and short story collections, and has translated numerous books from German, including works by W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Jenny Erpenbeck. She received the Hanguk Ilbo literary prize in 2003, and the Tongseo literary prize in 2004. Her novel, Nowhere to be Found, was one of her first books to appear in English, and was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.
Interview with Bae Suah
The Essayist’s Desk, published in 2003 and written when its author Bae Suah had just returned from an 11-month stint in Germany, was the first book I ever translated, staying in my friend Sophie’s spare room during the freezing Seoul winter of 2012. I first heard of Bae during initial reading for a PhD in contemporary Korean literature; she was described as ‘doing violence to the Korean language’, which I think was intended as a criticism, but which sent me on an immediate search for fiction by this author who sounded thrillingly like Clarice Lispector (whose Complete Short Stories are currently being translated into Korean, via the German translation, by none other than Bae Suah herself).
But the book for whose publication Bae Suah and I are currently on a bookshop tour of the States is not called The Essayist’s Desk but A Greater Music. ‘A greater music’ are in fact the novel’s first words. The entire first passage, which stretches over three pages, circles through a discussion of why that phrase, ‘greater music’, is both ungrammatical and inappropriate in the situation, making it fiendishly difficult to translate (a recurrent theme with Bae Suah’s work). It was this book in particular that garnered the criticism of linguistic violence, its Korean apparently sounding as though it had been translated from German – precisely what its protagonist, a young Korean writer staying in Berlin, is attempting in her language classes, writing about Schubert, statelessness, and the teacher with whom she has fallen in love.
The second of Bae’s books which I’ve translated in full is known to its Korean readers as The Low Hills of Seoul, but the book that came out from Deep Vellum in early 2017 is titled Recitation. Initially, I toyed with combining these two as The Low Hills of Seoul: A Recitation. It’s a stretch to call a disembodied voice a protagonist, but former ‘recitation actor’ Kyung-hee is the closest this novel has to one. But while the book features instances of recitations given on stage and heard as recordings, the more significant and indeed revolutionary thing is that it is written as a recitation. The first six chapters consist almost entirely of reported speech, as a group of people unspecified in both number and gender recall the stories told them by Kyung-hee, the young woman they encounter at a train station and invite back to their apartment, convinced that she also hails from the country they left long ago. Technically speaking, then, the book is narrated by this ‘we’, but it isn’t until the final chapter that their collective voice takes over as they travel to Seoul in search of Kyung-hee, only to be met with claims that there is no such job as ‘recitation actor’, and that ‘there is no Kyung-hee’. Emotion burns through A Greater Music, which has one of the most devastating breakup scenes I’ve ever read, while Recitation burns with ambition, an eclectic synthesis of ideas, images, scenes. Reading it is like boarding a caravanserai travelling through Vienna, Mongolia, and Seoul, with cameos from Elfriede Jelinek, Placido Domingo, and the Dalai Lama, and references to shamanism, Egyptian mythology, and Total Recall. Both, for me, are masterpieces.
—D. S.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Central to A Greater Music is the experience of learning a foreign language, of living somewhere which is foreign to you, where you understand the language only imperfectly – an experience that you yourself had in Berlin, which is also where this book is set. How did that feed into your writing?
ABAE SUAH — The protagonist of this novel shares many points in common with me. I did not know a word of German when I arrived, and tried as far as possible to approach the new language through literature. My impressions of that initial period do not match up completely with the actual life that I led there; I misperceived many things because of my imperfect German. Some of these misunderstandings made their way into the novel, in particular through my descriptions of Germans. I hope that readers do not assume that all of the details in this novel are factually accurate.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — From at least A Greater Music onwards, your main characters often share certain similarities – they’re travelling, romantically unattached, financially precarious. What attracts you to this kind of character? What’s important about them for the kind of works you want to write?
ABAE SUAH — In most instances I have a clear intention when I choose a female protagonist. They are women who refuse or cannot have their own place in traditional society. I love such women. Women who cannot be guaranteed social status through marriage, or women who refuse to marry in order to obtain it; women who do not suppress themselves for the sake of their parents or siblings; women who, as a result of their independent personalities, are lonely and financially precarious. Women who go their own way in accordance with their own stubbornness, and who are not afraid to do so. I am very interested in such lives. And so I plan to write about these women in the future as well. I wish to endow them with an aesthetic status through my fiction. And I want to make them cross a certain border that I myself could not cross because my bravery was insufficient. I wish them to be stronger than I am.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — The original Korean title of A Greater Music, literally translated, is ‘The Essayist’s Desk’. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil defined ‘essayism’ as an aversion to the axiomatic, a deliberated provisionality, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to the possibilities of intellectual adventure – all of which seems to fit your work wonderfully. Do you see an affinity there?
ABAE SUAH — Musil’s book The Man Without Qualities has been translated into Korean. I’ve read it, but only the Korean translation. And so I wasn’t able to get a proper feel for the atmosphere of the original. Musil said that the characteristics of essayistic writing were provisionality, uncertainty, the possibility of intellectual adventure. I write novels, but cannot make any prescriptions about what the form should be. A story is like a universe. I think that it is unlimited, simultaneous and open. No one theory is able to explain the universe entire, and it is the same for literature.
I gave this novel the title The Essayist’s Desk because I wanted a slightly freer form, one that would give me greater distance from the melodramatic excitement that fiction can generate. Although this novel deals with incidents of intense emotion, I wanted to enclose them in a form that would nevertheless escape the romantic melody.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — In an interview, you described A Greater Music as one of the novels that are less representative of your style, and one of your most political books. I also know that you have little desire to see your writing interpreted as tracts about or against certain social issues. Is there a way to discuss the politics of A Greater Music – sexual, social or otherwise — that isn’t reductive?
ABAE SUAH — I think that I made several experiments in style and technique. Perhaps I deliberately started to use very long sentences from writing A Greater Music onwards. In Korean literature, people do not much like to write long sentences. It is not uncommon to believe that the shorter a sentence is, the better. And that the only reason for writing otherwise is ineptitude. But I think a little differently. Perhaps because I am attracted to German writers whose sentences are long and strictly precise, while also well-tuned and beautiful. When I wrote A Greater Music, I thought of it as a story of an unequal love. And isn’t that a strange situation? Could love really come about if human beings were equal? Such questions came to me as I was writing it. These days I am often writing sentences that are a little more concise and have many echoes. They are short stories on the theme of childhood.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Your writing is stylistically and linguistically unconventional – critics have described it, particularly in A Greater Music, as ‘sounding as though it had been translated’, and many of your novels feature inconsistent chronology. But it’s also different from much of what we might think of as ‘experimental’ or ‘avant garde’ writing in that it has such a strong emotional core. What’s your relationship to the idea of experimentalism?
ABAE SUAH — Yes, I have heard many people say that my writings share this ‘translation style’. In Korea, it is a criticism often used to mean ‘Korean that cannot be good’.
I think non-chronological narrative is one of the techniques that all writers use. I am very interested in things like time’s simultaneity, a story that flows in reverse order. Like you, I don’t think of my writing as avant garde. I tend to rely in many parts on narrative, plot, story. And I even struggle with the method of communicating such things. Though I enjoy experimental attempts, I don’t think of that as a characteristic running through my work as a whole. I’m very interested in techniques for communicating a story in a new way.
I consider A Greater Music a love story; but there seem to be many more instances of people reading it as about language or music. Perhaps this is because they have read critics’ writings? I like intense emotions. Feelings are the protagonists of my fiction. But when I express them in writing, that creates a little more distance. I like investigating them through a specific perspective, at a remove.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — In common with so much of your writing, Recitation involves a particular kind of travel – ad hoc, avowedly ‘aimless’, accomplished by unattached women without much money, who are originally from South Korea. Travelling on foot, which the protagonist Kyung-hee decides is ‘the purest imaginable form’ of travel, nomadic tribes and nebulous identities are held up as ideals, consistently frustrated by national borders, ID cards and immigration officials, alongside the bureaucracy of the European modern nation state and its discrimination against people from Asia.
ABAE SUAH — For South Korean citizens, travelling on foot has long been a symbol of impossibility. South Korea is surrounded by sea, and travelling to North Korea is something unimaginable. For the sake of comparison, it was something more improbable than Jesus walking on water. Of course Kyung-hee cannot travel this way. But the very first thought that comes to her is this grand symbol: ‘to go on foot’. And the inability to do so means having to entrust oneself to the bureaucratic apparatus of passports and visas, and the necessity of obtaining such things. Human beings, born free, should be able to travel to all places on their feet, but really everyone is in a state of confinement, imprisoned in their homeland (or, perhaps, in their mother tongue).
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Recitation involves a lot of references to shamanist practices, specifically central Asian, though shamanism is also indigenous to the Korean peninsula. Then there’s the online community known as ‘Karakorum’, and the various cities of Asian Mesopotamia that are referenced both here and, in passing, in A Greater Music. I also know that you wrote a non-fiction book based on your own travels in Mongolia. What attracts you to Central Asia?
ABAE SUAH — Though shaman faith developed in Korea too and has been passed down quite well-preserved, Korean shamanism has been pushed to the fringes of society over the course of the country’s modernisation. Though in reality, the traces of shamanist belief remain in the unconscious, in a syncretic form with religion, with Buddhism. In Korea, the position of shamans – who are all women – is not a respected one. It’s not the work of intellectuals, but dismissed as something undertaken by uneducated women. Though shaman traditions can be the subject of academic research, it is not explored as a serious form of belief: a shaman can be confused with a fortune teller. In Mongolia it’s different. Shamans are seen as intellectuals and healers, those who supervise communion with nature. They’re also musicians and poets. Galsan Tschinag, a shaman I met in the Altai mountains, is a novelist who writes in German. I think that the most significant part of shamanism is seeing human beings, not as liberated from nature, but as part of one universe.
Karakorum is the name of an ancient city in Mongolia, but I use it in place of ‘couch surfing’, where travellers share their living space with each other. I wanted to discuss travel that bridges the east and west, like Marco Polo, which is why I replaced the modern term with the medieval.
When I first went to Mongolia, the nature landscape, of course, made the greatest impression on me. Once I went to the Altai, there was the true Mongolia. Altai is in the north-western region of Mongolia, near the borders with Russia and Kazakhstan. I stayed in a ger along with twenty German-speaking Europeans. In the Altai, nature was oppressive from the day I arrived. It didn’t conform in a single way to the idea I had of ‘nature’ – green vegetation, fresh woods, fruit-bearing trees, grass, sea, beautiful refreshing scenery. In one of the books I read in order to go to Mongolia were the words ‘stone mother iron father’, and earth of the Altai was precisely that. The landscape called ‘steppe’ had no grass, and the river flowed grey. The wind always raged. There was no electricity, no telephone, no coffee, no salad. It was truly isolated. I came to believe that at some point mothers had formed out of stone, fathers out of iron. And I came to believe that fire probably would have been the first human god. In that place, nature wore its original face.
The second greatest impression were from the nomadic people themselves. Particularly their faces, their ‘expressionlessness’. It was the expression of the Koreans I had known as a child. If you look at photographs from the old days, Korean people have faces that are sullen, stiff, and hard, as though angry. But it is not that they are angry, nor displeased. They’re simply facing unfamiliar people or an unfamiliar object, and so look awkward and embarrassed. But, now, due to Western influences, Koreans – or at least city dwellers – are not expressionless as in the past. In the Altai, looking at the nomadic faces, it was as though I had time travelled. Our guide, a Swiss woman, said to me: ‘looking at you, who have walked here from far away, I thought you were a nomadic woman I’d never seen before, carrying a shepherd’s crook, wearing a woollen skirt, who’d come to our ger…’ At the time I was carrying several branches that I’d picked up in the course of my walk, you see. I did not forget those words. I came back from my trip and wrote a travel essay, and that book’s title became ‘A Nomadic Woman Who I’d Never Seen Before’.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — For a book narrated by a disembodied voice, Recitation has an extraordinarily intense physicality, with repeated references to obscure body parts and ailments. In all this, the body is further specified as the female body – an anatomical diagram of the vocal chords resembling the female reproductive system, in a woman with her legs spread. This, and the passage describing the myth of the Egyptian goddess Nut, insinuates the female body as that which takes into itself and produces from itself, ‘mutually penetrating and acting’, as in A Greater Music. Could this be another reason for your choice of female protagonists – subverting the idea of the body as something which roots us in concrete reality and provides a solid sense of our own identity?
ABAE SUAH — I wanted this book to be read with the whole body; with the flesh. This novel is a voice, and the voice is an inherently physical entity. Individual voices differ according to the shape of the vocal chords, creating a characteristic through which we distinguish one other. It can neither be faked nor falsified. Through the ear of the one (reader) hears the voice of another (the novel). I wanted that voice to flow materially into the body, to reside at each region of the body. I tried especially to make the description of physical sensation and relations come alive: re-presenting images and symbols through repetition. For example, the passage which describes Mr Nobody giving Kyung-hee an eye kiss, licking her eyeball, whilst at the same time hinting doubly at sexual conjunction. The word ‘mucous membrane’ would be the core of that. Human beings enter into others through regions of mucous membrane: eyes, mouth, throat, genitals, anus. ‘Penetrating and passing through’ can occur on various levels. In the novel I wanted to describe a radically physical touch, the sensation of feeling a new dimension through the touch of a mucous membrane, which has no skin. An example of these membranes are the vocal chords, and the voice that resonates. I think that the myth of the Egyptian goddess Nut, which explains the cycle of the universe through a woman’s body, fits well with this novel. Coincidentally, in Korean ‘vocal chords’, seong-dae, and ‘genitals’, seong-ki, begin with a syllable which has the same sound. Though of course the hanja are different.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — What was it like answering questions about your writing from American readers, and listening to translated readings of your words during your tour of the US? Given that you can understand but aren’t fluent in English, did it feel alienating at all?
ABAE SUAH — Though the meaning as it is originally designated is the author’s, the sounds – which become the body of that meaning: the number of syllables, the vocabulary, the rhythm, the pronunciation and intonation – are the creation of the translator. Even though I listened to the same passage repeatedly at each event, I always enjoyed it.
As we were there focusing on my other book, A Greater Music, it seemed that many of the audience had a connection with Berlin. In Korea, readers are able to feel that they breathe the words of the reading in unison with me. In America that is impossible. Instead, the audience are alienated. That is the greatest distance. But I wish and hope that a form of language can nevertheless be communicated, through sound, rhythm, meter. That’s why I enjoy readings.
QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Translation highlights the need for, and the difficulty of, precise expression – the social contract necessary to believe that a word is the thing it describes. What attracts you to the writers you translate, and to the process of translation itself?
ABAE SUAH — Among my fellow writers, there are several who, though they’ve previously worked in translation in the past, do not wish to continue translating. In general, they want to be precise and faithful to the original. Due to the impossibility of this, they consider translation difficult and taxing. But I think a little differently. I tend to believe that the same word does not exist precisely in different languages. A single word has various meanings, and is translated into another based on one of these, which is the representative meaning. The spectrum of meaning or atmosphere of nuance ends up being unmade. And so I do not agonise greatly over vocabulary. Perhaps I am a lazy translator. Instead, I tend to agonise over the sentences as a whole. Rather than selecting precise words individually, I want to change the sentence structure in order to communicate the original feeling.
Personally, translation is an act of reading and recommending a book to others. I select the books I translate very carefully. I struggle over whether I’ll be able to respond to the original sentences appropriately; whether there’ll be a good synergy between the original and my translation. There are books for which the translator makes little difference, and there are books for which each translator offers a completely individual translation. I prefer the latter kind. This kind of translation gives the translator a pleasure similar to that of creative writing. In my work, I see this form in my translations of Pessoa and Sebald, and the Swiss writer Robert Walser.
*
This interview was selected for inclusion in the 2017 Translation Issue by Daniel Medin, a contributing editor of The White Review. He is Associate Director for the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and an editor for The Cahiers Series and Music & Literature.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
DEBORAH SMITH 's translations from the Korean include The Vegetarian, Human Acts and The White Book by Han Kang, and A Greater Music and Recitation by Bae Suah. In 2015 she founded Tilted Axis Press, publishing cult contemporary Asian writing. In 2016 her translation of The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize and an LTI Korea Award. She also won an Arts Foundation Award for her work as a translator both on and off the page, which includes teaching, mentoring, consultancy and reviewing. She studied English at the University of Cambridge and Korean Literature at SOAS. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.
BAE SUAH is a highly acclaimed contemporary Korean author, and has been described as 'one of the most radical and experimental writers working in Korea today'. After making her literary debut in 1993 with the short story 'The Dark Room of Nineteen Eighty-Eight', she went on to write several novels and short story collections, and has translated numerous books from German, including works by WG Sebald, Franz Kafka and Jenny Erpenbeck. She received the Hanguk Ilbo literary prize in 2003, and the Tongseo literary prize in 2004. Her novel Nowhere to be Found was one of her first books to appear in English, and was longlisted for a PEN Translation Prize and the Best Translated Book Award.
THIS ARTICLE FEATURED IN THE MARCH 2017 ONLINE ISSUE.
A Greater Music
263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p83.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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A Greater Music
Bae Suah, trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Open Letter, $13.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-940953-46-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
After a three-year absence, an unnamed writer returns to Berlin in this dulcet, contemplative novel from the author of Nowhere to Be Found. The visit becomes a "continuation of a dream" for the narrator, one that began when she was first being tutored in German by M, a sickly woman with "eyes like a winter lake with an iceberg at its heart" whose twin loves of literature and classical music matched the narrator's own. Their relationship swiftly turned to romance, and instilled in the narrator "the desire to write, the blazing desire to set down sentences that were true, sincere, and not the stuff of children." After a fit of jealousy sent the narrator spiraling into a "swamp of shame," she abandoned M for Seoul. At home, the screening of a banal film makes her realize she's made a terrible mistake. A far cry from that "unbearable celebration of the conventional," this novel stutters through its recollection of events, digressing regularly to ruminate on figures like the composer Bernd Alois Zimmerman or the German writer Jacob Hein. The structure bedevils as much as it illuminates, but ultimately, this book serves as an articulate and moving reflection of how life can stop "for a time in a certain fluid place between past and future." (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Greater Music." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 83+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609273&it=r&asid=5ca9b7473ccc78f6cdea4f661ad6ef27. Accessed 2 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461609273
Bae, Suah: A Greater Music
Terry Hong
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Bae, Suah. A Greater Music. Open Letter. Oct. 2016.128p. tr. from Korean by Deborah Smith. ISBN 9781940953465. pap. $13.95; ebk. ISBN 9781940953472. F
Out on a January walk in Berlin, the unnamed Korean narrator falls into a river. As she struggles to breathe, her experience gives way to both "conventional memories" of what has led her to this icy trap dovetailed with tenuous endeavors to comprehend and explicate a "[g]reater music ... a greater universe ... a greater distance from the present location." She's returned from Seoul to house- and dog-sit for a sort-of lover, which sparks detailed flashbacks of her last stay in Berlin, when she took unconventional German lessons with a private teacher with whom she became entangled. Bae--herself a notable German-into-Korean translator whose third title-into-English-translation is exquisitely rendered by acclaimed British translator Smith--repeatedly challenges the limitations of language. In content and execution both, this novel is sharp, laconic commentary on dissonant vocabulary, the elusive challenges of mutual understanding, and the too temporary balms provided by music, literature, and even intimacy. VERDICT Bae's intriguing new title (after Time in Gray; Nowhere To Be Found) is another multilayered elegy, sure to find shelf space beside recent internationally lauded Korean imports, including Kyung-sook Shin (Please Look After Mom), Han Kang (The Vegetarian), and Gongji-Young (Our Happy Time).--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "Bae, Suah: A Greater Music." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 77. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459804957&it=r&asid=e2b83fee24e1ed46e7b90d07405bd26f. Accessed 2 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459804957
Bae Suah. A Greater Music
Melissa Beck
90.6 (November-December 2016): p72.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Bae Suah. A Greater Music. Trans. Deborah Smith. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2016. 128 pages.
A Greater Music is another addition to a growing body of literature that explores the idea that human sexuality is more pliable and fluid than the rigid labels we assign to it. When the unnamed narrator of this story falls into an icy lake while visiting her boyfriend, Joachim, in Berlin, her memories of past and present blur together into a meandering and reflective narrative.
The narrator is a Korean writer who first came to Germany three years prior to her current visit in order to study its language and literature. She had difficulty learning in a traditional classroom environment, so she hired a private tutor, a woman who is only referred to as M. in the text. M.'s love of literature and music mirrors her own, and as the two women bond over their common interests, an intensely romantic relationship also develops.
The narrator's relationship with M. is sharply contrasted to her current love interest, the practical-minded metalworker Joachim. When the narrator arrives in Berlin after her three-year absence, she stays at Joachim's apartment, and they do all the typical things one would expect of a couple: they walk the dog; they eat meals together; they watch television. But never once do they exchange any terms of endearment or signs of affection. The narrator's longest and most memorable story about Joachim involves a New Year's Eve party they attended together at which they have a terrible time and leave early.
By contrast, the narrator's best memory of M. is the time they spent alone together on a cold winter afternoon in a house in the suburbs of Berlin. "That was a happy time for me," she writes. "That whole period of my life seems to have passed by in a flash but if asked whether my happiness was purely the result of being with M., I would have to say yes, it was." But if the narrator was so happy with M., what happened to them, and why is she with someone like Joachim, who is so completely different? By analyzing this intense relationship through the lenses of music, literature, and language, the narrator slowly exposes us to the unraveling of this love affair and her resulting sense of shame and regret.
Melissa Beck
Woodstock Academy, Connecticut
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Beck, Melissa. "Bae Suah. A Greater Music." World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 6, 2016, p. 72+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469459932&it=r&asid=7a1171bb666b5df9c7333fc6afce6859. Accessed 2 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469459932
A Review of A Greater Music by Bae Suah
Gretchen McCullough
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
(Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, 2016)
Reading Bae Suah’s novel, A Greater Music, is much like the experience of listening to the concertos of Beethoven. I listened to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, mentioned in the novel, and heard a fluty playfulness in the music that does not match the pensive mood in the prose; however, the novel resonates with a serious, philosophical intensity. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, on the other hand, is simply grand. In A Greater Music, Suah’s young narrator muses upon many of the grand, existential themes of life: love, friendship, betrayal, freedom, memory, and death. The coming-of-age novel revolves around a series of dream-like vignettes of a Korean narrator who has come to live in Germany: she is initiated into love and art by the mysterious, cultured M., a music aficionado. Suah, the writer, herself, is a translator, living in Berlin, translating German literature into Korean – and one can see the strong influence of German culture on her writing.
A Greater Music circles around a series of poetic flashbacks, like musical movements, rather than following a conventional linear plot. The novel opens with the first-person narrator’s reflections upon the delicate, eccentric M., and tracks their relationship through the memory of listening to music together: Shostakovich, Schubert, and Beethoven. M.’s great aunt has died, so she and the narrator have gone to “collect her things.” The voice on the radio announces a program of “greater music.” She remembers how she heard Shoshtakovich’s “At the Sante Prison” for the first time, “the song of a condemned man awaiting death.” Yet everything is not unpleasant, as the narrator remembers how she opened the window to let in the “crisp air.” On her way home on a dark, rainy night, she thinks that listening to the music made her “acknowledge the omnipotence of death.” As an adolescent, she first tried to play the piano and violin, but did not become a musician; however, M. has deepened her love of and appreciation for classical music. The narrator is as elliptical as M., but we learn that she is unforgiving about her own tastes in popular music (Abba) as a teenager, and her deference to the group in a Korean secondary school.
Next, there is a second flashback when the narrator falls into a freezing lake during winter. Suah plumbs the depths of consciousness and memory of a person about to die. The narrator feels as if she were in a dream – observing herself with detachment, yet acutely aware. Under the water, images flash in front of her: limp geraniums, white drapes, glass dolls, and green Christmas candles. As she is thrashing in the water, she is aware of the irony that she will die before M. – and we learn that M. is in fragile health and has had “a parade of illnesses.” She feels regret that M. would not hate her anymore and would not learn about her death: both clues to their estrangement. Translator Deborah Smith’s precise, sensitive use of English captures the psychological terror a drowning person must feel:
The cold was lethal, and my limbs were rapidly becoming numb. I’d fallen into the water, I knew this perfectly well, yet I kept on mechanically lifting my legs up and down. I imagined I was walking down a flight of stairs—stairs of water, which were rapidly extending downward as I placed my feet on the next step…I was going to mumble that something had gone wrong, but my frozen lips wouldn’t part. Icy water had seeped in between them when I first fell in, freezing them into immobility after my first initial cry of distress. Water bearing the deep chill of midwinter, water that pierces and penetrates warm winter clothes, cold enough to carry off my soul.
Through subsequent flashbacks, we learn the origins of her affair with M., and of the distance that would come to separate them. M. was to teach the narrator German, but the lessons are too theoretical and philosophical. Instead, they become lovers. M. introduces her to an “artistic English and German” teacher named Erich. She reflects briefly about her unhappiness in Korean schools, hours of “feigned obedience and non-participation.” She remembers how she submitted compositions to Erich and he corrected them, describing M’s eyes: “those eyes each like a winter lake with an iceberg at its heart.” However, she would have to return to Korea because of her financial situation. M. cannot go with her because of her rare health problems and feels abandoned. Ultimately, the narrator feels as if she were leaving because she is scared of “long-term love,” rather than the issue of money. Erich shows up drunk at M.’s house and hints that M.’s homework was “really great.” M. has referred to August Platen’s poetry, which Schubert set to music in “A Winter Journey” and he has guessed from her essay that she and M. are lovers. But the narrator is also surprised when M. confesses that she has slept with Erich.
Perhaps the biggest betrayal in the novel, though, is when the narrator decides to break off her relationship with M. before she goes back to Korea. She felt she could not continue being “burdened by the oppressive weight” of her love for her. Because she could not possess M. completely, she becomes “savage.” Later, she regrets renouncing the relationship:
Beauty, delicacy, concern and generosity, peaceful seclusion, reading, music, and writing…and the union of two souls, found after so long; was it right to have betrayed and destroyed all those things in the work of an instant?
When M. comes to her apartment, she refuses to let her in and M. spends the night on her doorstep in bitterly cold weather. She becomes severely ill and her knees swell, and is taken away in an ambulance; she ends up spending a month in the hospital. When they see each other again, M. asks her about the accident in the lake, which the narrator says she does not remember. Throughout, the novel echoes the motifs of lightness and heaviness of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which takes place during the Prague Spring: two women, two men, and a dog with an incestuous group of intellectuals, who betray each other easily. However, Suah’s novel is set in contemporary Berlin. The real focus is homosexual love, rather than heterosexual love, but the outlook remains similar: the narrator feels “lighter” once she has decided to break off her relationship with M. However, once she returns to Korea she becomes alienated and depressed. She sees Sumi, one of her old friends, as trendy and unoriginal. Unlike her stimulating life in Germany, everything seems “packaged.” Being with Sumi makes the narrator yearn once more for M.
Like Kundera, Suah is writing against Nietzche’s idea of eternal recurrence: the idea that time is infinite and events will recur again and again. In fact, we have one life to live, and the choices we make at crucial junctures in our lives may not be repeated. For example, the narrator remembers her final meeting with M., which could have been a reconciliation, but neither can get beyond their pride and shame to forgive each other, and so the relationship ends.
Perhaps Suah is also suggesting, like Kundera, that not only is life fleeting, but love, time, emotion, and memory, are as well. In modernity, there is a dissolution of time and individual faces disappear. She thinks: “How can we ever really know about what a person is?”
As one might expect, such a philosophical novel does not end neatly or tidily. The narrator tells us that she feels most comfortable when she is writing. And slyly winks, telling us she will not divulge more about the origins of the stories, or where they go.
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Gretchen McCullough is a writer and translator, teaching at the American University in Cairo. Her stories and essays have appeared in: The Texas Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Barcelona Review, NPR, Storysouth and Guernica. Translations in English and Arabic with Mohamed Metwalli include: Nizwa, Banipal, Brooklyn Rail inTranslation and Al-Mustaqbel. Her bi-lingual book of short stories in English and Arabic, Three Stories from Cairo (2011) and a collection of short stories, Shahrazad’s Tooth, (2013) were published by Afaq Publishers in Cairo. You can read more of her work by visiting her website.
Houman Barekat reviews A Greater Music by Bae Suah
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith (Open Letter, 2016)
Thirty-seven pages into Bae Suah’s latest novel, her Korean narrator-protagonist is having a wretched time at a New Year’s Eve party in Berlin. Her shyness and her poor command of German have precluded her from partaking of the revelry; she wants to go home. Her date for the evening, an on-off boyfriend named Joachim, is unmoved by her plight: “Just smile and join in, and if you listen hard enough one of these days you’ll end up understanding what they're saying.” This is the gist of the novel in a nutshell: A Greater Music is about language as a gateway to culture and social belonging. ‘Ultimately’ writes Bae, ‘“earning a foreign language” is too simplistic an expression for a process which is more like crossing a border; similarly, an individual’s development as a human being is only possible through language, not because language is our only means of communication, but because it is the only tool precisely calibrated for the application of critical thought.’
This is the narrator’s second stint in Berlin; much of the novel is made up of reminiscences of the first, three years earlier, during which she had a love affair with her German tutor, an androgynous-looking woman called M. In their very first lesson, M has her read aloud from texts she cannot yet understand. Her pronunciation is so poor that M can barely understand her, and the anxious pupil scans her teacher’s face for signs of cognition, ‘the expression on her face constantly changing, shading into sadness, suffering, surprise, tedium, wistfulness, expressionlessness, defiance, rejection, desire.’ We then follow Bae as she devours a disparate array of books, highbrow and low, ranging from The Tin Drum to Harry Potter, Dubliners (which is printed erroneously as The Dubliners) to Karl Baedeker’s travel guides, American Psycho to Princess Diana: Her Glory and Myth.
M and Joachim could not be more different: M is the archetypal cosmopolitan intellectual, who believes that ‘[m]ental shallowness, poverty of thought, is no different from death;’ Joachim, by contrast, is relatively uncultivated. (The book’s clumsily worded back-page blurb—penned, almost certainly, by someone other than the text’s translator, Deborah Smith—describes him as a ‘rough-and-ready metalworker,’ which is enticingly homoerotic if nothing else.) The two inhabit markedly different discursive realms, and M’s eccentric teaching technique leaves Joachim understandably perplexed:
He couldn’t understand how on the one hand I was using predicates meaning “solid depiction of conditions” and “establishment of description,” or (to him) senseless expressions like “hybridity of words,” and asking him to explain absurd phrases which no one used, like “medieval itinerant students” or “solipsism,” when on the other hand, if I went to buy something at the supermarket, words like sugar, flour or biscuit would leave me stumped.
Bae’s narrator is painfully socially awkward, so much so that one suspects that her shyness is not merely a question of cultural-linguistic difference but of personal disposition. There is something discomfiting in her itemisation of the social interactions at the party, which blend envy and a vague sense of malevolence. She is a little too impressed by the ease with which the partygoers conduct themselves: ‘were their companion to disappear, they never stood there hesitating or wandered awkwardly around the room, but straight away attached themselves to another group and launched into conversation.’ She bitterly describes them ‘[s]miling and greeting each other, shaking hands and exchanging superficial, perfunctory chatter, while knowing full well that such things are nothing but a waste of one’s energies.’ The latter part of that sentence is especially disturbing, with its casual assumption that social human contact is fundamentally frivolous. This misanthropic streak finds another outlet in the novel’s latter section, when a visit to a cinema with her friend Sumi is marred twice over: first, by her inability to shake her existential revulsion towards the audience’s herd behaviour (‘there was something deeply unsettling about this long line of people all heading in the same direction’), and later by her decision to embark on a lengthy rant about how saccharine the movie had been. (Sumi asks, not unreasonably: “Coming to see something conventional, and then complaining that it’s conventional, well, isn’t that a bit strange?”) The pair fall out; the narrator decides Sumi is just too mainstream for her. This is followed by an extremely revealing segment about attending a highbrow classical concert, in which the narrator recalls ruining the experience for herself by fretting over the possibility that her enjoyment of the concert might be undermined by some minor logistical problem, audience interruption, or a problem with the acoustics. We are invited, implicitly, to consider whether this is the logical end-point of neurotic puritanism in cultural consumption: perpetual dissatisfaction, and a life rendered tortuous.
If A Greater Music is about language then what, you might reasonably ask, is with the title? The book’s opening pages sketch a précis of the narrator’s relationship with that art form, which is her one true love: we learn that as a schoolgirl she was a fan of Maria Anderson and Maria Callas, Fischer-Dieskau, Beethoven, and Schubert, and obsessed with the morbidity of Shostakovich. She took up an interest in the music of ABBA in order to fit in with her classmates—a harbinger of that conflict between ‘high’ ‘and ‘low’ cultures over which she would continue to fret. At the beginning of the novel a radio DJ uses the term ‘greater music’ to describe a Shostakovich piece he has just played. The narrator is enthralled by the strange simplicity of the phrase: she muses over the appropriateness of the comparative form (‘We never say “greater death,” death being an absolute value that does not admit comparison.’) and then riffs on it, waxing epiphanic, almost delirious: ‘Greater death . . . a greater universe, the soul of greater music, a greater rarity, a greater distance from the present location . . . ’ It is the kind of passage one might expect to encounter in the middle sections of a novel—one of those meandering digressive asides—but here, at the outset, it functions as a kind of existential preamble. The titular mantra sets out Bae’s intellectual stall, signalling the novel’s preoccupation with culture in general, and with questions of definition and quantification in particular. On this note, it is perhaps worth pointing out that the phrase’s acquisition of an indefinite article in the book’s English title feels vaguely erroneous. It appears repeatedly in the translated text as ‘greater music’—sans ‘A’—and this ought to have been the title. The difference is minor but significant: the article strips the phrase of its sense of plurality, slightly diminishing its figurative force.
A salient motif in this novel is the fetishisation of the Other. Upon reading Christopher Hein’s memoir, Forms of Human Coexistence, Bae’s narrator finds herself disappointed that the East German author—whose own background is, to her, endlessly fascinating—hankers after the vulgar charms of New York. Later, reflecting on how things turned awry with M, she reveals that she had long suspected that M’s affection for her was contingent on a position of privilege (‘she was rich and unconstrained, the holder of a linguistics degree, easily taken up by whatever was novel . . . ’) and maybe even racial curiosity (she had ‘become unconsciously influenced by Asian mysticism’). Her own treatment of ‘rough and ready’ Joachim might, of course, be accounted for in similar ways. Bae’s narrator describes her fear of being perceived to be ‘one of those puffed up, permanently unsatisfied egoists who swell the ranks of the lower-middle-class’—and that, of course, is more or less what she is. In this way A Greater Music articulates a critique of a certain kind of dilettantish narcissism that is probably in some sense integral to cross-border cultural exchange, perhaps even intrinsic to human curiosity: our notions of what constitutes idealisation and appropriation are contingent not only on cultural context but also on the peculiarities of individual subjectivity.
A Greater Music is the fourth of Bae Suah’s books to be translated into English. Her previous works, most notably the novella Highway with Green Apples and Nowhere to Be Found (the latter was long listed for the 2015 PEN Translation award), dealt in similar tropes: themes of estrangement and cultural alienation; brusque, disaffected female protagonists and loveless couples. Deborah Smith’s crisp, taut translation renders Bae’s voice in a curtly diaristic register that neatly complements the protagonist’s predicament. There is an almost total absence of warmth, and such humour as we get is sardonic and distinctly bitter; it is a vivid rendering, in short, of the sense of impotence and claustrophobia that comes with finding oneself in a foreign country without the tools—the cultural capital —to adapt and feel at home. As to whether there is readerly enjoyment to be had in this morose litany, that is perhaps something of a moot point. The sense of torpor is an end in itself: if Bae’s narrator comes across as self-absorbed and jejune, that’s probably because she is. Her better self cannot flourish in these conditions.
Aside from a couple of descriptive passages, the story is sparsely told: Bae flits between the protagonist’s interior mind—a welter of recriminations and rationalisations—and a briskly adumbrated narrative punctuated by brief, terse exchanges of dialogue. The lesbian affair itself is only obliquely signposted, although one wonders whether the solitary allusion to physical contact—‘After I’d finished rubbing M’s feet dry, I sat on the floor . . . ’—was intended as a coy euphemism. What gives Bae’s novel a distinctly melancholic timbre is that her protagonist’s endeavours in the linguistic sphere are ultimately unsuccessful. She convinces herself that, ‘If only M had taught me music rather than language,’ things might have turned out better between them. Music, with its ‘blanket forgiveness of human faults,’ is a truer basis for human connection. Instead, the couple had been muddling through, operating at a level removed from themselves, and therefore destined to drift apart: ‘The language through which we attempted knowledge of each other was a mere dialect, a mimetic representation of the two entities that were M and myself.’ The protagonist notes, in that very first lesson, that ‘[t]he difference between understanding and not understanding was all too conclusive, like that between a rich man and a poor man.’ And so it proves. Cognition is a currency, and the world of human relations as brutal and unforgiving as any marketplace.
Reviewed by:
David Cooper
After two novellas translated into English (Nowhere to be Found, 2015 and A Greater Music, 2016, the latter reviewed in NYJB) South Korean post-modernist fiction writer Bae Suah and British translator Deborah Smith—who also translated A Greater Music and two novels by Han Kang (The Vegetarian and Human Acts)—return with an even more ambitious full length novel, Recitation, a novel of ideas with frequent philosophical digressions that further develops A Greater Music’s theme of living abroad while also addressing globalization, racial identity, and intolerance. It is a challenging yet cognitively engaging and rewarding read.
Whereas in A Greater Music the nameless South Korean first-person narrator is also the protagonist and the setting is mostly Berlin with one brief chapter in Seoul, by contrast in Recitation an unnamed first-person female narrator relates the nonlinear story of Kyung-hee, a divorced middle-aged South Korean recitation actor who after breaking her toe during a performance adopts the vagabond lifestyle of an international traveler, which affords her the opportunity to engage in long philosophical conversations with a variety of friends and acquaintances in several foreign cities including Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and an unnamed capital city of a now independent former Soviet republic. She returns to Seoul periodically where she replenishes her funds by narrating audiobooks.
Recitation’s initial chapters are somewhat reminiscent in style and plot elements of A Greater Music. Like that book’s protagonist, Kyung-hee also enjoys classical music. She choses Munich as a destination because she enjoys the international broadcasts of that city’s Bayern 4 classical radio station. A Greater Music’s narrator has a German teacher referred to by her initial M., and Kyung-hee’s former German teacher is named Maria.
In Munich Kyung-hee rents a room with an onion-domed ceiling and a skylight at the pinnacle in the home of an elderly and culturally refined retired teacher couple with whom she attends cultural and social events. When she moves to Berlin her new landlord is a Korean shaman healer/masseur and her fellow tenant in the apartment is also Korean, but this does not diminish Kyung-hee’s sense of herself as a citizen of the world, a feeling that may explain why she more than once forgets to carry her passport with her at all times.
How Recitation’s narrator may or may not figure in Kyung-hee’s life is related late in the novel, and how she reconstructs long detailed conversations in which she was not present can only be inferred. Those conversations include a variety of esoteric topics, but one recurring theme is Kyung-hee’s contention that residents of large cities irrespective of nationality constitute a cosmopolitan tribe who have more in common with one another than they do with their rural fellow nationals and are more drawn to international corporate symbols such as the woman in the Starbucks logo than to their own national flags and emblems. Rural and working class nationalists worldwide might disdainfully agree; the 2017 publication of the English version of this 2011 novel is timely.
This urban cosmopolitanism may explain why although specific sections of the novel are set in specific cities Kyung-hee sometimes recalls first meeting someone “in a European city” and other times doesn’t specify time or place and never mentions in which languages conversations occur. Likewise Kyung-hee’s lover is referred to as “Mr. Nobody.”
Kyung-hee’s Berlin landlord is a traditionalist who disapproves of his Korean tenants’ non-Korean romantic partners, but he’s not an unlettered ignoramus. When not seeing patients he spends his days at a local library studying German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he engages Kyung-hee and Mr. Nobody in a long conversation about Egyptian mythology and how the sun god Ra is both his own father and child (a folktale toward the end of the novel also has an Oedipal theme).
Mr. Nobody is one of several characters who challenge Kyung-hee’s urban elitist globalism. Like her he has an East Asian appearance, but unlike her he grew up in the former Soviet Union the son of rural tribal pastoralists. Although he acquired higher education and became an academic and journalist he doesn’t take his privilege for granted, and his and Kyung-hee’s class differences as well as his ideological stridency doom their relationship. While they are still together Bae’s narrator captures a surrealistic intimate moment:
“Almost at the same time as she spoke, a specific point on one of Mr. Nobody’s mucous membranes passed over the keenly-alert spot on one of Kyung-hee’s own, adhering closely. An invisible fire passed slowly over, burning vigorously. The tip of his tongue prised Kyung-hee’s eyelid open, and took some time to lick the surface of her eyeballs clean. His tepid saliva soundlessly scalded Kyung-hee’s eyes. Kyung-hee shuddered, now aware of the fact that she was not a person but some primitive organism made up only of duplicated sensations, a blind insect-cum-mutant butterfly with thousands of eyelids. With thousands of eyelids that open as one.”
Which specific mucous membranes is left to the imagination of the reader, whom Bae invites to speculate about so many of the novel’s vague details. This is not a book for lazy readers; Bae expects us to show up ready to work. Her handsome prose, however, is never an obstacle.
In the middle of the novel the pace picks up as the dense prose is interspersed with dialogue and narrative movement. Kyung-hee becomes friends with Mr. Nobody’s oldest son Banchi, a fellow former student of Maria, a Buddhist, and now a married father, whom she visits in his unnamed home city where he quotes Philip Larkin’s poem “Talking in Bed” to discuss the concept of home.
He also introduces her to the egalitarian global travel organization Karakorum whose members (including Maria) provide one another with free hospitality. Middle-class hosts may offer a spare bedroom, while struggling members might only offer floor space in the corner of a bedroom in a shared apartment.
At Banchi’s suggestion Kyung-hee travels to Vienna to see Maria, who is now working as a supermarket cashier. At a Starbucks across from the opera house Kyung-hee has a long conversation with a white haired East Asian man during which they never introduce themselves by name or country of origin.
Though he is a complete stranger Kyung-hee describes intimate details of her childhood as the younger daughter of conservative academic parents who expressed love through harsh discipline, and includes a disturbing scene with her much older sister whom she never sees again.
In his response, the East Asian man cites W. G. Sebald (an author Bae has translated into Korean) in The Rings of Saturn quoting Jorge Luis Borges’s short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" on the negation of time. The East Asian man explains “that this world’s expiration date has already elapsed, and that the sensations and happenings which we believe ourselves to experience, which we feel is life, are no more than the flickered reflections of faint, fictitious relics which the final stages of this by now vanquished world have left to linger within the light.”
The East Asian man later mistakes Kyung-hee for Chinese, and a hostile Austrian mistakes her for Vietnamese. Despite her urbane globalism, in Berlin and Vienna Kyung-hee finds herself among East Asian expats. Bae accurately describes the transience of ex-pat communities.
Kyung-hee recalls to Banchi how she tried to stay in touch with his father, but “he’d returned to Russia. To White Russia, that is, which, to him as a university student, had ‘inscribed distinctly into the flesh what it means to wander the streets and train stations of the world with the face of an East Asian.’ The country that had had a strong white fist, the country that had been like a cold steel net.”
Banchi asks her, “Are you aware that there are fewer and fewer places these days where, as an alien, an outsider who believes in taking an objective point of view, you can squeeze your way in and be accepted?”
Kyung-hee describes herself as having Manchurian, Mongolian, and Siberian physical features, but since those are the nationalities to which Koreans are genetically closest, what does her self-description reveal? Perhaps that she is not at peace with her Korean identity, which may explain her travel bug.
The enigma of Kyung-hee’s literal identity and very existence is central to the novel’s final section where Bae demands the most challenging mental work of her readers, which may call to mind the East Asian man’s explanation of Borges’ negation of time. Set in Korea, it also describes Seoul’s economically blighted periphery that illustrates the cost of globalization. Recitation will make Bae’s anglophone readers and other fans of post-modern fiction eagerly await the publication of more of her novels in English.
David Cooper is the author of two poetry ebooks, Glued to the Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire, the translator of Little Promises by Rachel Eshed, a journalist at examiner.com, and an experienced reviewer of erotica.
RUARY 2, 2017 · 12:18 PM ↓ Jump to Comments
Review: Recitation by Bae Suah
I received an advance review copy of this title from Deep Vellum via Edelweiss.
My Review:
recitationBoth of Suah’s books that I have read, A Greater Music and Recitation, are relatively short as far as novels are concerned, but both books took me a week to read; because of their complexity and language dense with poetry and philosophy they required and demanded my full attention. When Recitation opens, the main character, Kyung-hee, is in a train station in a European city but has no hotel reservations or a specific address to stay. She is waiting for a person whom she has never met, a fellow-wanderer introduced to her by a friend who has agreed to let her sleep in his living room for a few days. When the fellow-wanderer stands her up, Kyung-hee meets a group of Korean immigrants who become fascinated with her and they take on the role as the narrators of her story.
Recitation is, among other things, a reflection on what it means to feel at home somewhere in the world, it is a commentary on why we feel grounded and at peace in some places but not in others. Kyung-hee travels around Europe and Asia, never staying in one place for very long. She doesn’t identify herself as Korean, Asian, or the resident of a specific city, but instead she calls herself a “city dweller.” The specific cities to which she travels are vague and not the focus of the text; each city becomes for her a palimpsest upon which she can inscribe her own experiences anew with each visit. She identifies with the Starbuck’s logo more than any other symbol because it is the one thing that remains the same no matter where she goes.
Kyung-hee meets people to whom she does not assign specific names—the healer, the teacher couple, the German teacher, the East Asian man. Even her lover is simply assigned the name of “Mr. Nobody.” One of the few people she meets that she does call by name is Maria, but Maria is a shadowy figure that lingers in the background for much of the book with no specific details given about her life. We only learn at the end of the story that Kyung-hee meets Maria in Berlin and Maria has allowed hundreds of travelers stay at her home throughout the years. Another interesting detail about the people she meets is that they are all somehow connected. The German teacher introduces her to the teacher couple and Mr. Nobody introduces Kyung-hee to his son Banchi who also knows Maria. It is Maria that introduces Kyung-hee to the community of Karakorum who are a tribe of global dwellers, never staying in one place for very long and for whom the mere fact of their wandering makes them uniquely connected and a type of community.
The most interesting and compelling part of the text for me was Kyung-hee’s descriptions of her job as a recitation actress and how an incident one night on stage gave her the motivation to travel the world. As she is in the middle of a recitation, she walks across the stage and breaks her toe which causes her a great deal of pain. When she gets the cast off of her foot she has a revelation:
It was probably the incident with the plaster cast that brought about that desire to detach myself from a specific location, to free my material self from being tied to a given set of coordinates, fixed in a single place. Looked at from a certain angle, perhaps its more accurate to call my soul the author of that shriek of despair, and relegate my toe to the role of intermediary.
In addition, Kyung-hee describes her childhood in Seoul as she grows up under the strict and abusive authority of her parents. They have little love and affection for their daughter and control every aspect of her life, including the types of books she is allowed to read. She has a sister who is much older than her whom she rarely sees or interacts with. In addition, her older sister is not subjected to the same harsh rules as Kyung-hee. She lays around the house most of the day, has no job and smokes in her room without drawing any type of criticism from their parents. One night Kyung-hee’s sister appears to her naked in her bedroom and her sister attempts to strangle her. There are many layers of intriguing imagery that Suah weaves throughout the story of the sisters that makes us question their relationship and connection to one another. After reading this part of her story I viewed Kyung-hee as less of a woman possessed with a sense of wanderlust and more of a refugee; she has been forced out of her home by the cruelty of her family and can never return to that home.
Suah’s book ends on a vague note which is fitting for the rest of the narrative in which time, places and characters oftentimes blend together and become blurred. Kyung-hee herself becomes a shadow of a figure; has she been real all along and since she never had a fixed home will anyone remember that she ever existed? Is Kyung-hee destined to be one of those nameless refugees that are exiled from their home, never to return to a place of comfort and familiarity? The Karakorum reminded me of the Greek concept of xenia which demanded that men give each other a warm place to stay, a meal and entertainment when they were traveling. If a Greek did not offer such hospitality to a fellow traveler then he could be ostracized from his community and the same hospitality would be denied to him as a traveler. Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if we extended the idea of xenia especially to refugees who are in the greatest need of comfort and hospitality?