By Bruce Fulton
Kevin O’Rourke’s passing has deprived us of our most accomplished translator of Korean literature, past and present, prose and poetry. His published translations span a period of nearly fifty years. His first book-length translation was Ten Korean Short Stories, published by Yonsei University Press in 1971, a mere seven years after he arrived in Korea in 1964, in his mid-twenties, as one of the Columban Fathers. This volume of stories ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s was republished, with the addition of an eleventh story, in 1980. His most recent translations were of modern short fiction, and when in November 2019 he was stricken with the brain hemorrhage that ultimately claimed him, my proposal to Penguin England for an anthology of modern Korean short stories conceived of by the two of us had just been accepted.
In the five decades separating Ten Korean Short Stories and the Penguin anthology Kevin completed what he considered to be his life’s work as a literary translator: to bring alive in English the totality of the Korean poetic tradition, from hyangga to poetry of the new millennium. But in between the dozen or more volumes of Korean poetry he translated, he also produced The Square, the first translation of a modern Korean novel to gain international attention. This translation of Ch’oe Inhun’s Kwangjang, issued by a small publisher in the United Kingdom in 1985, was honored with an international literature translation award. And My Twisted Hero, his translation of Yi Munyŏl’s 1987 Yi Sang Prize-winning novella “Uri tŭl ŭi ilgŭrŏjin yŏng’ung,” was perhaps the first translation of a work of modern Korean fiction to be issued by a major American commercial press (Hyperion, 2001).
Ultimately it is Kevin’s translations of shiga (“poetry and song”) that remain the foundation of his five-decade translation oeuvre. The year 1988 witnessed the publication of Tilting the Jar and Spilling the Moon, his translations of poets representing three eras of Korean history: Yi Kyubo from Koryŏ; Chŏng Ch’ŏl, Yun Sŏndo, and Kim Sujang from Chosŏn; and Sŏ Chŏngju from the modern period. The reprinting in 1993 of Tilting the Jar and Spilling the Moon by Dedalus, an Irish publishing company, ushered in a two-decade period in which most of Kevin’s book-length translations of poetry were published. In 1995 Dedalus published a volume of Kevin’s translations of Sŏ Chŏngju, whom he regarded as Korea’s most accomplished modern poet. In the same year, the Cornell East Asian Series published Kevin’s anthology of Yi Kyubo’s poetry, Singing Like a Cricket, Hooting Like an Owl. Four years later Dedalus followed with Kevin’s anthology of modern Korean poetry, Looking for the Cow. Significantly the title of this volume is a shijo by Han Yongun, Buddhist reformer and anti-colonial activist. Significant because Kevin had first published translations of shijo in the 1988 edition of Tilting the Jar and Spilling the Moon, and in 2002 would publish with Harvard University Press a volume devoted to that genre.
Kevin popularized Korean poetry not only in his books but in an occasional “A Poem for Breakfast”column in the Korea Herald. Among the poets he introduced in this series were Chŏng Ch’ŏl, Hyeshim, Pak Mogwŏl, and Sŏ Chŏngju.
One of the little-known delights of Kevin’s opus is a trilogy of pocket-book volumes issued in 2001. One is devoted to Yun Sŏndo’s shijo cycle The Fisherman’s Calendar, one encompasses a millennium of verse, and the third focuses on shijo by poets known and unknown.
In the new millennium Kevin continued to focus on poetry. A longstanding goal was to anthologize Korean verse from early times through the modern period. Looking for the Cow, his anthology of modern poetry was already in print. From there he returned to the beginning, translating hyangga and the Koryŏ songs various termed sogak kasa, sogyo, changga, and pyŏlgok, as well as hanshi from Shilla and Koryŏ. Translations of these works were collected in his 2006 volume The Book of Korean Poetry: Songs of Shilla and Koryŏ. Another eight years were to pass before the capstone—or, in Kevin’s words, “the missing link”–was in place, The Book of Korean Poetry: Chosŏn Dynasty.
Kevin’s diversity as a translator cannot be overemphasized. His Selected Poems by Kim Sakkat (a trilingual edition) is firsthand evidence of the success of this iconoclastic poet in incorporating the Korean oral tradition into the venerable body of hanshi, Korean poetry written in Chinese and observing Chinese prosody. The Whiskey Jacks (a bilingual edition) is a heartfelt work of speculative fiction. And Kevin was one of the first to translate one of the most accomplished storytellers of contemporary Korea, Kim Aeran, as well as another distinctive voice from the new millennium, Kim Chunghyŏk.
Kevin also found time to mentor novice poets in Seoul as well as student translators from the University of British Columbia. For many years he served with me on the editorial board of Acta Koreana, focusing on this journal’s Literary in Translation series.
In addition to Kevin’s two dozen-plus volumes of Korean literature in translation, we are blessed to have his literary memoir (Kevin was himself a poet), My Korea: Forty Years without a Horsehair Hat. (My review of this volume appears in volume 20, no. 2 [December 2017]: 625-27, of this journal.) “My Korea” is not an exuberance: Kevin was fond of saying that when at his residence in Rosslare, on the southeast shores of Ireland, he was on holiday, and that when his return flight landed at Incheon Airport he was back home.
Bibliography
Ten Korean Short Stories. Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1971. (translation)
A Washed-Out Dream. New York: Larchwood, 1980. (revised edition of Ten Korean Short Stories; includes an eleventh story)
Ch’oe Inhun. The Square. Devon, U.K.: Spindlewood, 1985. (translation)
The Shijo Tradition. Seoul: Chŏngŭm sa, 1987. (translation)
Yi Munyol, Our Twisted Hero. Seoul: Minŭm sa, 1988. (translation)
Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon. Seoul: Universal Publishing, 1988. (translations of Yi Kyubo, Chŏng Ch’ŏl, Kim Sujang, and Sŏ Chŏngju)
Tilting the Jar, Spilling the Moon. Dublin: Dedalus, 1993.
Sŏ Chŏngju. Poems of a Wanderer: Selected Poems. Trans. Dublin: Dedalus, 1995. (translation)
Singing Like a Cricket, Hooting Like an Owl: Selected Poems of Yi Kyu-bo. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Series, 1995. (translation)
Looking for the Cow: Modern Korean Poems. Dublin: Dedalus, 1999. (translation)
Seo Giwon (Sŏ Kiwŏn), The Ma Rok Biographies. Seoul: Jimoondang, 2001. (translation)
Yi Munyol, Our Twisted Hero. New York: Hyperion, 2001. (translation)
Yun Sondo, The Fisherman’s Calendar. Seoul: Eastward Publication, 2001. (translation; bilingual edition)
Mirrored Minds: A Thousand Years of Korean Verse. Seoul: Eastward Publication, 2001. (translation of poets ranging from Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn to Hwang Chiu)
Shijo Rhythms. Seoul: Eastward Publication, 2001. (translation of shijo by Yi I, Chŏng Ch’ŏl, Yun Sŏndo, Kim Sujang, An Minyŏng, and anonymous singer/writers)
The Book of Korean Shijo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. (translation)
Songgang Kasa: A Shijo Poet at the Court of King Sonjo: The Pine River Songs. London: Kegan Paul 2005. (translations of poetry by Chŏng Ch’ŏl)
The Book of Korean Poetry: Songs of Shilla and Koryŏ. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. (translation)
Kim Hŭich’ŏl, The Whiskey Jacks. Seoul: Shiny World, 2011. (translation; bilingual edition)
My Korea: Forty Years without a Horsehair Hat. Folkestone, Kent, England: Renaissance Books,2013. (literary memoir)
The Book of Korean Poetry: Chosŏn Dynasty. Singapore: Stallion Press, 2014. (translation)
Selected Poems by Kim Sakkat. St. Paul, Minn.: Koryo Press, 2014. (translation; Korean translations by Han Kyŏngshim)
Kim Tong-in, Potatoes, Seoul: Asia Publishers, 2014. (translation; bilingual edition)
Chang Yong-hak, The Poetry of John. Seoul: Asia Publishers, 2015. (translation; bilingual edition)
Yi Sang, Wings. Seoul: Asia Publishers, 2015. (translation; bilingual edition)
Songgang Kasa: A Shijo Poet at the Court of King Sonjo. Digital Library of Korean Classics 22. Seoul: LTI Korea, 2016. (translation of poetry by Chŏng Ch’ŏl)