June 22, 2011
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7176556.ece
Land is a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet
Margaret Drabble
Pak Kyung-ni’s novel, Land, opens colourfully in 1897 at the traditional feast of the harvest moon, still one of the most important dates in the Korean calendar, where we are introduced to some of the hundreds of characters who people the vast canvas of this five-part national epic. Pak (1926–2008), one of the most celebrated twentieth-century Korean authors, centres her best-known work in a rural community which, through the generations, suffers the natural disasters of famine and cholera – both described in painful detail. The characters also feel the reverberations of distant armed conflicts in a rapidly changing world order, as centuries of rule by the Chosun dynasty stagger to a violent end. Agrarian uprisings, aggressive nationalism, modernization, modern weaponry and the invading Japanese threaten a stoic way of life that had endured, if not always prosperously, for hundreds of years. This is a work of immense ambition, covering nearly fifty years of history, and closing with the Japanese surrender in 1945. It appeared in serial instalments between 1969 and 1993, and the total text consists of more than 7,000 pages.
Land’s translation into English by Agnita Tennant is a landmark, and her undertaking is heroic. Hers is the first publication in English, although I am told that sections have appeared in authorized and unauthorized versions in French, German, and Japanese, and that a translation by a team of Chinese scholars is in progress. Tennant’s three-volume edition represents only Part One of the entire oeuvre, but, although seeded with intriguing premonitions of future events, it reads as a self-contained narrative. Over these volumes, we come to know the tenant farmers, the embattled landowners, their servants, and the children of the rising generation, all poised at a watershed in history. We enter their world, we follow its seasons, we learn its topography, and we see through them the tragic history of twentieth-century Korea unfold. The realities of the political backdrop are obscured from the villagers by ignorance and isolation, and news of revolution, assassination and capitulation filters towards them slowly, indirectly and not always in sequence, from Seoul and beyond; there are some strange loops of chronology that remind one of Joseph Conrad’s narrative techniques. But change is slowly if uncertainly approaching and an immemorial way of country life, rooted in Confucianism and Buddhism and ancestor-worship, is about to disappear forever.
Pak was brought up under Japanese rule, but she studied Western literature in Japanese translation (she never learned English) and was familiar with the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Balzac, Maupassant, Dickens, Hardy, and William Faulkner. For an English reader, Hardy is the most obvious point of reference, and his poem “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” comes frequently to mind – a poem that defiantly celebrates the continuity and timeless rhythms of rural life even as they violently disintegrate. We find in Pak a similar deep-grained dark cosmic pessimism and stoicism, a sense of a natural world more often hostile than benign, and an awareness of casual human brutality (the beating of servants, the caning of children, mob hangings) embodied in many a grim country proverb. The harshness is alleviated by moments of tenderness (even towards insects) and by the beauty of the landscape; by passages of lyric delicacy evoking the fields of grain, the flowing river, the flowering trees, the sunlight in the forest, the vines of wild grapes, the lily pond. But Pak’s realism exceeds Hardy’s: her characters blow their noses a lot; they suffer from diarrhoea and other physical ailments that he might have shrunk from describing; and their many visits to the privy are not veiled in literary decency. I am not sure that Hardy ever mentions a privy.
Pak has a powerful gift for strong but subtle characterization. Her people are not the types of earlier Korean fiction, nor are they the simple heroes and villains of folklore (although there are some villains), but vividly imagined individuals, each playing a linking part in what could easily be imagined as a television series. (There have been several adaptations.) Korean readers have their favourites: the doomed love affair of the handsome, unhappily married young farmer Yongi with the shaman’s daughter Wólsón is a popular storyline. She is a social outcast (there is a strong class system at work in village society), but she is an independent, intelligent, resourceful woman, and we watch her passionate relationship with Yongi wax and wane over the years until the affair settles into a sort of marriage by default. The descriptions of Yongi’s barren and angry wife Kangch’óng-taek, whom he has never loved, are also moving: for years consumed by violent jealousy, she has been forced to live in a cold and sterile home at the mercy of her husband’s public rejection and alienated affections. He has never felt anything for her but “pity and guilt”, yet after her death (more shades of Hardy) he remembers her when she was a child bride, standing before him in the fields “with a handful of pasque flowers, her skirt billowing”.
The gossip and malice and mutual support of the village women, at work among the crops, at home, round the well, stealing one another’s vegetables over the garden fence, sharing often sparse but sometimes festive meals, are beautifully portrayed, and their relationships, like those of Yongi and Wólsón and Kangch’óng-taek, shift over time as new alliances are forged, old friendships betrayed, new spites engendered. The workings of a whole neighbourhood and its many households are brought to life.
Pak, living in what was still a patriarchal society, writes well and easily of the male world, of the tediously opinionated schoolteacher with his strongly anti-Japanese but naive political views, of the kindly sweet-dispensing old doctor, of the scholarly, vengeful, sexually ambiguous and impotent heir to the estate. Pak is good (as were the Brontës) on the boredom and repetitions of a small community where so few have even a basic education. But she is also good with the artisans and eccentrics – the skilled and enterprising pock-marked carpenter, the dissident freethinking fisherman, the solitary hunter. The hunter is a fine portrait of a loner who prides himself on his skill in the mountains, tracking deer and bear and the elusive legendary tiger, earning his living by selling animal skins. He is tamed and brought down by sexual frustration and an obsessive passion for a self-serving and ambitious servant in the landlord’s household, who seduces him and leads him into murder and treachery. He, despising her, cannot free himself from her thrall.
Sex and violence and political unrest are here in plenty, as the landlord of the estate struggles to ward off impoverished but pretentious “modernizing” relatives from Seoul, with their Western clothes and their hair cut short – fine comic villains – who have a greedy eye on his land. Servants plot against their master and against one another. The beautiful young daughter of the waning house, Sohui, a child abandoned by her runaway mother, is growing into a proud, rebellious spirit who will one day have her revenge, just as her attendant, the seamstress’s daughter, may one day become a singer. This is a man’s world, but the younger women are beginning to see beyond the walls of their confinement.
Pak’s own life was hard; she was widowed young at the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950 and had to write to support herself and her family. Her early work is full of war widows and grieving women. But in Land, which in time brought her international recognition and wealth (and enabled her to endow the T’oji Cultural Centre), she reached beyond this personal material to a larger historical vision. She believed in the land, lived simply, wore homespun clothes, smoked heavily, and encouraged the growth of organic vegetables. Culture and vegetables, it is said, vied for her attention at the T’oji Centre. Throughout her magnum opus the theme of land and seed, of womb and semen, or sowing and growing, is deployed with a challenging intelligence and a questioning of genetic and national destiny – the imagery is used very differently from the way it is used in the Western tradition; it manifests a different cosmic view, but is not incomprehensibly alien. Agnita Tennant, like Constance Garnett before her with the great Russians, has done English readers a service by opening up new territory.
It was not easy. The confusing publishing and editorial history of the many volumes, the transliteration of names (even Pak’s name has accepted variant spellings, as Pak or Park Kyongni), the length of the text, and the difficulty of translating colloquial Korean conversation presented her with obstacles. The proverbs must have proved particularly challenging. Some have an instant resonance: we know what is meant by “sometimes the sun shines in a rat hole”, or “if it’s your fate to die you’ll drown in a saucer of water”. But others retain a suitable mystery. The recurring phrase “it’s less than the blood in a bird’s leg” is strangely suggestive. In spoken Korean it has an epigrammatic concision impossible to convey in written English. And yet it is a phrase that figuratively conjures up a whole physical and mental landscape, another culture. Tennant has made this culture accessible to us, in a remarkable and important work in which Eastern and Western traditions fruitfully meet.
Pak Kyung-ni
LAND
Translated by Agnita Tennant Three volumes 1,171pp. Brill. 145euros.
978 1 906876 04 3