The Colloquium on Literary Translation
Abstract:
Before becoming North Korea's capital, Pyongyang was already known as Korea's most modern city—a centre of education from the turn of the 20th century and a growing industrial centre in the 1930s. The city inspired a distinctive form of modernism and Ch'oe Myŏngik was its most inspired writer. This talk explores the pleasures and difficulties of bringing Ch'oe's midcentury fiction into English, from his elegies to a city transforming under capitalism to his record of the destruction wrought by aerial bombing during the devastating Korean War. What does it mean to translate Pyongyang modernism today?
Bio:
Janet Poole
Distinguished Professor of the Humanities and Chair
Department of East Asian Studies
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