Auld Author  – Hwang Sunwŏn (1915-2000) by Bruce Fulton

Hwang Sunwŏn was born near Pyongyang, the capital of present-day North Korea, and was educated there and at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he majored in English literature. He was barely in his twenties when he published two volumes of poetry. His first volume of stories appeared in 1940. He subsequently concentrated on fiction, producing seven novels and more than a hundred stories. In 1946 he and his family moved from the Soviet-occupied northern sector of Korea to the American-occupied South. He began teaching at Seoul High School in September of that year. Like millions of other Koreans, the Hwang family was displaced by the Korean War (1950-53). From 1957 to 1993 Hwang taught creative writing at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.

Among modern Korea’s short story masters, Hwang Sunwŏn reigns supreme. He was the preeminent short story writer in a nation that prides itself on its accomplishments in that genre. His coming-of-age story “The Cloudburst” is known by every Korean with a middle-school education. And he is the Korean short-fiction writer best represented in the English-speaking world, attracting some of our finest translators. This is the legacy; how did it come about?

First of all, Hwang is one of the great storytellers of modern Korea. In this sense, he went against the grain of much of modern Korean fiction, especially post-1945 fiction, which is to a large extent a literature driven by the territorial division of the Korean peninsula following the end of World War Two. It is evident from Hwang’s fiction, however, that he starts with a story and allows issues, such as they are, to develop therefrom. 

Second, Hwang’s command of the Korean language is striking. Whether he is using Sino-Korean or native Korean vocabulary, the standard speech of Seoul or the dialect of his native P’yŏngan Province, whether he is phrasing dialogue in direct or indirect speech, he has a knack of finding the right word or expression. His writing style, correspondingly, is marked by precision, purpose, and subtlety. As the pioneering Korean literature scholar and translator Marshall R. Pihl once noted, Hwang “tells us only what we need to know and only when we need to know it.”He wastes few words and, except when he utilizes repetition to establish a narrative rhythm or parallelism, rarely repeats himself.

Not surprisingly, Hwang’s mastery of Korean and his terseness of style render his stories amenable to English translation. This is not to say they are easy to translate. Although the lexical problems are comparatively few, Hwang’s stories, like most great literature, resonate on several levels. They are rich in symbols, dreams, implications, and subtleties. Word choices in English are therefore crucial. The translator who fails to capture these subtleties risks producing a skeletal translation, one that while accurate is lacking in depth.

The uniform excellence of Hwang’s short fiction should not be surprising considering his devotion to his writing. He observed a regular schedule, focusing on one story at a time and then returning to revise. He was unusual among Korean writers in his willingness to edit his own work. And during the late years of the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula (1910-45), when it became increasingly difficult for Koreans to publish in their own language, Hwang would instead gather with his friends in his ancestral home and read aloud to them drafts of his stories–a practice that helps account for their usual pitch-perfect dialogue.

Also appealing is the great variety of Hwang’s hundred-plus published stories. They range from the naturalist to the surreal. Their settings are rural or urban, mountain or seaside, sometimes specifically Korean and, especially in some of his early stories, sometimes culturally nonspecific. The majority of his stories utilize third-person narrative. The protagonists range from children to the elderly to animals, from the educated to the uneducated. Hwang is attentive to local customs and knowledgeable about Korean folktales and occasionally incorporates these in his stories to good effect.

And it is Hwang who, among modern Korean fiction writers, most successfully combines the universal with the local. He is universal in that he transcends the polarity between pure literature and engaged literature that has informed much of modern Korean fiction both thematically and ideologically. He is local in his faultless ear for Korean speech rhythms and his command of physical and psychological detail, which renders the Korean landscape, both exterior and interior, almost palpable to the reader.

Finally, Hwang is both a modern and a traditional writer. He is modern in his familiarity with Freudian theory, literary modernism, and contemporary trends in both Western and East Asian literature: he read contemporary Japanese authors in Japanese, and especially liked Shiga Naoya, and read authors such as Lu Xun, Ernest Hemingway, and Albert Camus in translation. He is traditional in his storytelling skill. He made no secret of the debt he owed his elders, at whose feet he heard many a story as a boy, and he acknowledged as well the veterans whose accounts of war inform his novel Trees on a Slope and his stories that take place against the background of the Korean War. Among Hwang’s several narrative approaches, the one that perhaps best reflects the performance of the traditional storyteller is his use of indirect speech. Also distinctive is his tendency to reserve the first-person narrative voice for his autobiographical stories, which constitute about one tenth of his short-fiction oeuvre.

The stories of Hwang Sunwŏn offer a bracing experience for those who prefer their fiction short, and especially for readers of modern Korean fiction in English translation, which until very recently has tended to showcase works with compelling themes but not necessarily commensurate narrative skill.

Three miniatures
The children
The Photograph
Metamorphs

Suggested Reading

The Stars and Other Korean Short Stories, trans. Edward W. Poitras. Hong Kong: Heinemann Asia, 1975. Includes an excellent introduction.

The Drizzle and Other Korean Short Stories, trans. Kim Chong-un et al. Seoul: Si-sa-yong-o-sa, 1983.

The Book of Masks, ed. Martin Holman. London: Readers International, 1989. Translations of stories from Hwang’s last collection of fiction.

Shadows of a Sound, ed. Martin Holman. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1990. Stories covering Hwang’s entire career.

A Man, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Seoul: Jimoondang, 2003. Includes, in addition to the title story, “The Dog of Crossover Village” and “Pibari.”

Lost Souls: Stories, trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Comprises Hwang’s story collections The Pond, The Dog of Crossover Village, and Lost Souls.

“A Backcountry Village,” trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, Koreana, Winter 1993.

“Doctor Chang’s Situation,” trans. Stephen Epstein, Chicago Review 39, nos. 3 & 4 (1993).

“Snow,” trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, Korean Culture, Fall 2001.

 “Coarse Sand,” trans. Edward W. Poitras in Modern Korean Fiction: An Anthology, ed. Bruce Fulton and Youngmin Kwon. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

“The Game Beaters,” in A Moment’s Grace: Stories from Korea in Transition, trans. John Holstein. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Series, 2009.

“A Sick Butterfly,” trans. Heinz Insu Fenkl, Azalea 8 (2015).

“At the School for the Blind and Mute,” trans. Jane Lee, Azalea 8 (2015).

“My Tale of the Bamboo Wife,” trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, Azalea 8 (2015).

“Cranes,” trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, Consequence 15, No. 1 (Spring 2023).

“Time for You and Me,” trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton in The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, ed. Bruce Fulton. London: Penguin UK, 2023.