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KOREAN STUDIES
REVIEW
Land, by Park Kyong-ni (trans. Agnita Tennant). London: Kegan Paul International,
1996. 617 pp. (ISBN 0-7103-0508-7)
Reviewed by Chun
Kyung-Ja
Harvard University
Park Kyong-ni [Pak Kyôngni] is among Korea's finest living
writers and her epic novel
Land (T'oji) is widely esteemed by her compatriots as a
monument of
contemporary Korean literature. Thanks to its inclusion in the UNESCO
Collection of Representative Works, the opening section of Park's magnum
opus is now accessible to readers in the English-speaking world. The
immense scale of Land -- sixteen volumes in Korean totalling
almost 7,000
pages which were published in serial form over the span of a quarter
century
(1969 to 1994) -- has intimidated many translators. Ms. Agnita
Tennant's
new English rendition comprises the first fifty-three chapters of the
novel,
slightly more than one-tenth of the whole. The translator has
performed a
valuable service in opening up to the world at least this segment of
Park's
novel. Fortunately, the beginning section can stand alone as a
self-contained narrative and its scope is sufficient to afford an ample
taste of the powerful imagination and distinctive style that have made
Park
Kyong-ni one of Korea's best loved literary artists.
Land is set in the countryside of Kyôngsang Province
in the
southeastern region of the Korean peninsula. The novel opens in 1897,
a
turbulent time when the Korean people were struggling against ever
deepening
threats of Japanese aggression, troubled by grave internal clashes
between
traditionalists, who sought to preserve the ancient culture of a
basically
agrarian society, and modernizers, who foresaw Korea's imminent ruin
unless
it developed the industrial power requisite for self-defense in an ever
more
ruthless world. The translated portion of Land spans about ten
years,
ending before the 1910 annexation of Korea by Japan, but the bulk of the
original novel actually takes place during the dark decades of Japanese
colonial rule, closing with the victory of the allies in World War II
and
the Liberation of Korea.
Park Kyong-ni's genius is evident in her use of "Land" as a title
and
master metonym of this sweeping, panoramic creation. From ancient
times
in Korea, as in all agrarian civilizations, land was the foundation of
everyday existence: land sustained life itself and agricultural
production
demanded a community of organized labor; the most basic values of a
Confucian, family-centered social and political structure were expressed
in
ownership and inheritance of land; and as the outside world increasingly
impinged on the Hermit Kingdom, control of the land forming the ancient
birthright of Koreans became inseparable from their collective identity
as a
nation. As an open-ended symbol capturing the tragedies endured as
well
as the triumphs achieved by the Korean people, "land" has an almost
inexhaustible richness.
Land is a national epic of Korea, though in a different
sense than
Tolstoy's great historical novel, War and Peace, is an epic of
the Russian
nation. Both novels are highly realistic and panoramic in scope, and
both
register the cataclysmic impact of trying times on people of high and
low
position in the social hierarchy, but Land contains no famous
historical
figures comparable to Tolstoy's General Kutuzov. The heroes in
Land -- and
they are compelling -- are entirely fictional. Moreover, against the
grain of the usual accounts of historians, the most fully developed
characters in Land include women as well as peasants and
servants. To do
justice to
the complexity of actual life, Park Kyong-ni weaves into her chronicle
not
only the fate of an aristocratic clan of rich landlords, the Chois, but
also
the story of the entire community, high status and low, living on the
Choi
estate.
The genre of the epic often calls to mind the grandiose stuff of
living
legends, great heroes engaged in warfare. Land is an epic of anonymous
nobility which cuts across class lines: the traditional value accorded
in
Korea to family lineage and to advanced learning by design is rendered
dubious in a story that scrutinizes character and human values in the
broadest possible range of situations. Park Kyong-ni describes the
full
play of life on the Choi estate using a blend of incisive character
sketches
and pungent, dialect-laced dialogue. The resonance her dialogue bears
for
Korean readers is largely untranslatable into English, but this style of
writing is Park's
forte as a realist and enhances her appeal.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined a term, "thick
description",
for a style of narrative that enriches superficial descriptions of
conduct
with an authentically complex underpinning of judgments, hopes and
fears.
In Land, the author does not so much tell as show the action:
she depicts a
sprawling cast of hundreds of characters whose function in the novel is
less
to advance a linear plot than to supply a deeper understanding of the
universe of human relations within which the tale unfolds. In a more
conventional type of novel such episodes might be regarded as irritating
digressions, but in Landthese sketches strike readers not as
abortive
subplots but as parts of a larger whole, illustrations of other sides
of a
seamless web linking a living community to the land they share.
Why has Land been so consistently popular, selling more than
one
million copies since the first installment appeared in 1969? The main
reasons are artistic and moral. Beyond her great talent as a creative
writer, Park Kyong-ni in Land unobtrusively espouses her own
vision of
natural justice and of the dignity of the humble. In a rapidly
industrializing society like Korea, values are in flux. Status
categories
traditionally anchored in family ancestry clash with emerging indices of
status based on wealth or expertise. This work provides a projection,
a
quite realistic expression, of the sorts of value conflicts underlying
ongoing conversations about what it means to be a Korean in a rapidly
internationalizing world. Thanks to her talent, Park Kyong-ni
manages to address a spectrum of today's timely issues, not least that
of
the public status of women in a society which long limited female voices
to
the private sphere.
The Korean critic Zeong Hyon-Kee aptly has written that Land
"portrays
the beauty of those who never lose their dignity, who never bend in the
face
of punishment, and the ugliness of those who gloat at their own
superiority,
who make the mistake of believing in the corrupt power protecting them."
The future agony of Japanese colonialism is but a dire premonition in
the
first part of Land, but at the turn of the century one of the
chronic
clashes of modern Korean history -- patriotism versus collaboration --
already had raised its head. The opening of the saga deals with the
aftermath of the recently suppressed Tonghak Rebellion, an uprising
intended
to expel the Japanese after the Sino-Japanese War, and describes the
"Righteous Armies" of Korean rebels who gave their lives to resist
foreign
conquest. For foreign readers, Land thus furnishes an
illuminating glimpse of a Korea in 1897 torn between past and future, a
country facing
catastrophe, yet whose population possessed an inner strength and
nobility.
The translation of Land is by and large reliable as regards
literal
faithfulness to the original, and some of the dialogue is skillfully
rendered. A few aspects of the translation could have been better
handled,
though most readers unfamiliar with Korea will barely notice such
shortcomings. The McCune-Reischauer system should have been used for
transliteration of proper names and place names. A number of
expressions
were translated in disregard of established conventions, generating
unnecessary confusion for readers who go on to explore Korean history.
Often, idiomatic Korean forms of address that have no simple English
equivalents are simply retained (in italics) with no explanation at
all. A
glossary or footnotes would have permitted readers to decipher these
otherwise mystifying usages. Still, the translator is to be commended
for
much hard work invested in a worthwhile endeavor. It is to be hoped
that
publication of this portion of Land is only the beginning, and
that more of
Park Kyong-ni's panoramic novel will be translated in days to come.
Citation:
Chun, Kyung-Ja 1998
Review of Pak Kyong-ni, Land (trans. Agnita Tennant) (1996)
Korean Studies Review 1998, no. 3
Electronic file:
http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr98-03.htm
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