VOL.99/2026.10

Special Project

 

Books that Critics from Each Generation Would Want to

Translate Themselves

 

 

2026.09

 

 

If you have ever loved a book that remains unpublished abroad, you have likely wondered why such a remarkable work was never translated. In keeping with this issue's focus on the art of translation, 〈Special Project〉 asks critics which book they would personally choose to translate if given the chance. Critics from each generation offered recommendations through their own lens, choosing books that introduce Korea or lay bare the realities of our society.

 

 

 

 

The 20s Perspective – Lee Sollim, Cultural Critic

 

 

Can the small, odd details of one person's life survive a border crossing? A Camera That Makes You Look Especially Ugly is the poet Shin I-in's second essay collection. If I were translating it, I would introduce it as ‘essays by an alien.’

 

Shin I-in is someone who doesn't blend easily into the world. She calls her thirteen-square-meter apartment a “rice chest” and keeps two lizards in it named Destruction of Humanity and Reconstruction of Humanity. (She also raises a few silkworms, originally meant as lizard food.) Having to find somewhere in this world to plant her feet and live, she writes, feels like “jamming a key into a lock it doesn't fit at all.”

 

Shin I-in, who goes so far as to call herself an alien, writes essays that are odd and refreshing. As the title suggests, this is a book written in the spirit of lowering the hand covering one’s face and simply standing in front of a camera that will make you look ugly. And yet she says the subject of this book is love. She states calmly that she intends to fulfill her duty as an alien who loves the world and worries over it. The crooked apple sitting large on the cover is crumpled and barely holding its shape, and the book is much the same. There's something endearing about it. Life sometimes feels so enormous and unmanageable that it crushes us, but Shin I-in turns it around and packs life down tight to sell it. As if to say that life or a book only needs to be entertaining, she writes, “Sometimes I wanted to compress life down into something small enough to sell.”

 

Where can these essays by an alien go? Near the end of the book, Shin I-in gives directions to a sweating foreigner. The older man fumbling his way through the subway turns out to be a professor who teaches literature in the United States. That brief moment of guidance leads to a brief email exchange between Shin I-in and the professor, Robert, and one meal together. The poet gives him a book of her poems in Korean, and the professor thanks her and goes on his way.

 

If this book were translated into English and landed in America, Robert could read it too. He might read his own bewilderment and sweat, back when he was a foreigner or an alien on unfamiliar Seoul ground, in Shin I-in's sentences, and laugh the way he did then. It's him I think of when I want to translate this book and send it to America. For that one reader who is already inside the book.

 

 

 

 

The 30s Perspective - Maeng Junhyuk, Publishing Editor

 

 

Kim Nae-hoon's The Radical Twenties digs deep into the political divergence between young men and women in their twenties, centering on the phenomena known as idaenam and idaenyeo, the politically charged labels for men and women in their twenties that surfaced around the 2022 presidential election. Even now in 2026, with a change of government behind us, the book's insights still hold. It's hard to find a better text for understanding where the extreme political distrust comes from, in a generation stretching from those born in the nineties to those born in the two-thousands. Above all, the fact that the author, born in 1992, writes his assessment from within his own generation sets it clearly apart from other books that look at young people from the outside, through the eyes of an older generation.

 

According to the book, what people born in the nineties mean by fairness is a kind of “sense of being treated fairly,” which amounts to trust in the national system and a belief in the predictability and stability of one's life. But the myth that effort brings reward broke down long ago. What remains for those driven into anxiety is retribution against anyone seen as having put in less effort. The author diagnoses that the fairness this generation wants has never actually been agreed upon socially, and that the claim “this isn't fair” is itself an empty signifier. Today the word fairness has been reduced to a weapon that shuts down healthy debate and deliberation and treats “our” struggle alone as sacred.

 

Young people cultivate hatred beneath this empty signifier. The book doesn't dismiss that hatred as mere ignorance or moral failing. For them, hatred is the product of a kind of storytelling that locates the causes of depression and anxiety in a personified group. Peel back the thick outer layer of gender conflict and what appears underneath is young men and women in their twenties denouncing the unfairness of Korean society in one voice. What they find unfair is the very structure that shifts social responsibility onto individual young people rather than onto the older generations and elite groups who created this world in the first place.

 

In the end, the political identity of today's twenty-somethings isn't formed through affirmation of any particular ideology or value. The generations that follow, born from the two-thousands onward, seem unlikely to cohere around a clear alternative either. Their solidarity forms only in opposition, as an “anti-network,” and it will go on forming that way. Chronic anxiety about the future and anger toward institutional politics become the adhesive that binds them together. Deeply distrustful of two-party politics yet unable to imagine anything beyond it, young people simply switch the party they support again and again to block one faction from returning to power, absorbed in passing judgment on the hypocrisy of the established order.

 

In conclusion, the book argues persuasively that the essence of this twenty-something phenomenon is not simple within-generation selfishness or a battle between the sexes, but the desperate struggle of young people crushed under structural contradictions. Behind the dazzling economic growth and the global success of Korean cultural content, a deep anger is boiling among young people who stand on ruins where the only rule left is every man for himself, warning of the system's hypocrisy. If this book were introduced abroad, it would serve as a meaningful text, offering a fuller view of the anxiety, the extreme political distrust, and the populist structures of antagonism that young generations everywhere are experiencing, seen through a cross-section of one dynamic society.

 

 

 

 

The 40s Perspective – Kim Mihyang, Publishing Critic

 

 

Into what language do we translate the memory of the dead? After reading Lee Ju-hye's story collection Outside the Parentheses, Farewell, translation no longer means only the craft of turning one language into another. It becomes the work of carrying into present-day language the memories the dead leave with the living, the violence inscribed on the body, events history never properly spoke of, and even the lives of others that resist understanding in the end.

 

Lee Ju-hye is both a novelist and a translator. She has brought a great deal of English-language literature into Korean, and the narrator of the title story, “Outside the Parentheses, Farewell,” is a translator as well. So it's no accident that translation surfaces as a preoccupation so often in this book. What's interesting, though, is how translation goes beyond a profession here. Lee Ju-hye's characters are constantly coming into contact with others, moving to other places, calling times already past into the present. In that process, just as discrepancies and omissions arise between an original and its translation, life produces its own discrepancies, omissions, and unexplained remainders. This collection doesn't throw that remainder away.

 

It's also striking how often the characters head for Japan, from the opening story “The Mood of Fog” through “Are You a Summer Guest?” to the title story. Japan isn't simply a travel destination. The moment a body moves into a space that is familiar and strange at once, memories stitched shut back in Korea return wearing a different face. “The Mood of Fog” holds a father's death and the shadow of an era, while “Are You a Summer Guest?” brings in a family history in which an uncle was implicated in the case of the alleged spy ring among Korean students in Japan, imprisoned, and died in prison. Behind private mourning, the violence of modern Korean history shows itself. And yet this heavy reality isn't rendered through the grammar of realism alone. Ghostly presences appear, fog and water erase boundaries, and errors in translation reveal unexpected truths. Lee Ju-hye's use of the fantastic isn't a device for fleeing reality. It's a method for bringing back memories that the language of reality never managed to put into words. Social engagement and fantasy don't collide here. They sharpen each other.

 

That's why I would choose Japanese as the first language this book is translated into. For Japanese readers, Hokkaido and hot springs, hotels and bathhouses won't be the scenery of a foreign country. But the moment those places pass through the memories of Korean women, they hold a different history and a different set of feelings. When historical memory like that spy ring case overlaps with Japan as an actual place, translation does more than “explain” a Korean story in Japanese. It makes Japanese readers look again at places familiar to them, now through someone else's memory. In effect, it sends a Japan written in Korean back into Japanese.

 

The recurrence of water and bathing grounds this sense of translation in the physical body. In Lee Ju-hye's fiction, translation touches on transformation, on changing bodies. “The Mood of Fog,” “Are You a Summer Guest?”, and “Outside the Parentheses, Farewell” return again and again to hot springs, bathhouses, and bodies submerged in water. In the water, the boundaries of a body blur, and memories that resisted explanation resurface as sensation. Notably, both Korea and Japan are societies where bathing culture runs deep in daily life. With Korean sauna and jjimjilbang culture drawing fresh attention from younger generations and readers abroad, this familiar part of everyday life could serve as an excellent point of entry into Lee Ju-hye's distinctly strange world.

 

Of the eight stories in this collection, the one I would most want to translate is “Fledging in Progress.” A translator, a novelist, and a poet drive toward the far end of the land. In the trunk sits something large, wrapped round and round in a beige blanket. It might be soft, it might be solid, and it looks warm and yet feels cold. No one even knows how long it has been there. The story never reveals what the load is.

 

They are driving to the end of the land to meet a philosopher who seems to have settled there in order not to fall, and then in order to live again. Read in that light, the load in the trunk feels less like an object than like the possibility of death that each of us carries without knowing it. It could be the weight of a life, or pain that has never been explained. And yet the title isn't “Dying in Progress.” It's “Fledging in Progress.” Just as a young bird leaves the nest, people keep moving too. Even with death riding alongside them.

 

This scene distills the whole of Outside the Parentheses, Farewell. Death visits often in this collection. But the dead don't disappear. They come back as memory, as ghosts, as sentences. The living don't stay fixed in a single identity either. They travel, they enter water, they encounter other languages, and at times they slip outside the self they thought they knew. Translation may be that kind of movement. To leave your original place, arrive in another language, and become something both the same as before and different.

 

For this reason, Outside the Parentheses, Farewell is not a book I want to translate simply because it easily introduces Korea to readers abroad. I want to translate it precisely because it refuses to explain Korea completely. It holds the specific wounds of modern Korean history, women's bodies, and family memory, yet it never stitches everything shut with neat commentary. What cannot be understood is left just as it is.

 

Good translation is not merely the work of conveying every meaning inside the parentheses. It is the work of gathering what has spilled outside them, what a sentence failed to catch, what remains ultimately unknowable in another person's life, and setting all of it before readers in another language. If the translation of memory she performed in Korean were rendered once more into Japanese, what remainder would be left behind? I want to translate that remainder too. Outside the Parentheses, Farewell is not a book that makes you fear failing at translation. It's a book that sends you across into someone else's world even though you know you will fail.

 

 

 

 

The 50s Perspective - Jang Dongseok, Literary Critic

 

 

The “K” wave is sweeping across the globe. It's now a common sight to see people everywhere singing along to Korean music, and Korean dramas hold the attention of viewers of every age around the world. Countless foreigners visit Korea just to taste the food. The saying that what is most Korean is most global describes the power of Korean content perfectly. At a moment when Korean content is taking over the world, the work we should be doing alongside it is tracing where that content came from, what its roots are. Only then can we create a wider range of content, and only then can its influence last longer.

 

Wicked and Insolent Creatures, by classical fiction scholar Lee Hu-nam, is a book of serious research into where Korean storytelling begins. The monsters that appear in classical Korean fiction are beings that “transform into an enormous variety of shapes.” Their misdeeds vary widely, and each comes to its own strange end. What's interesting is that these monsters aren't merely destructive. They are beings with “desires like those of humans.” To put it in the language of the content industry, having such desires amounts to being a compelling character.

 

Samgang Myeonghaengnok is a classical novel of unknown authorship from the late Joseon period, set against the ideals of loyalty and filial piety. Unusually, the figure who drives the story is a monster called Olchulbichae, who lures travelers, kills them, and cooks their flesh. Olchulbichae takes the form of a human woman, but with a red face, a waist as thick as a pillar, and tremendous strength. Monsters in other classical novels, when they transform into human women, take on the appearance of “a maiden from a noble household or a married woman.” Naturally, they live by imitating “human women whose lives are dictated by men.” Olchulbichae, though, plays the role of an “all-powerful female head of household” who even knocks her husband to the ground. Having thrown off the constraints of being human, Olchulbichae may be the character best suited to our own times.

 

One of the monsters most faithful to its desires is Daemang, or “enormous serpent,” from Wonhoerok, a work believed to date from the late Joseon period. A blue serpent that has lived thousands of years on Mount Hyeongak, Daemang is the very byword for corrupting the affairs of state. Disguising itself as a Taoist adept with mysterious powers, it enters the human world, violates a royal concubine, installs the child born of that act as emperor, and soon holds the entire country in the palm of its hand. According to the author, a story in which a monster becomes the ruler of a country outright, or seats its own child on the throne to manipulate the government, appears nowhere else. Under a meticulous plan, Daemang monopolizes the country's power, but it goes too far. The whole scheme is exposed to the world, Daemang meets a gruesome end, “beaten to death with wooden clubs.”

 

Beyond these, the monsters come in every form imaginable, including nine-tailed foxes, wild boars, and tigers. What's striking is how these creatures, imagined long ago, consistently mirror human desire. Beyond physical appetite and lust, their yearning to be loved and recognized is, in truth, a reflection of our own desires. What is distinctly Korean becomes universal precisely because it lays bare the shared desires of humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Written by Lee Sollim (Publishing Editor)

As an editor, she looks for books that will last. As a critic, she watches for new releases that demand to be read right now. And as a reader, she dreams of setting work aside to read purely for pleasure, secretly hoping to get locked inside a library one day.

 

Written by Maeng Junhyuk (Book Editor)

Rather than writing polished reviews or introducing books well, what he hopes for is that the sensibility he loves, and that others out there love too, comes across exactly as it is. As a Korean reader in his thirties who loves literature, he wants to speak, carefully, for some small part of that sensibility.

 

Written by Kim Mihyang (Book Critic·Essayist, IT Service Planner)

She worked as a publishing editor for thirteen years, three of them on books and ten on planning and editing a publishing magazine. She is the author of the essay collection My Mother Said She Wasn't Happy and a co-author of Keywords in Korean Publishing 2010-2019, What Is Cinema?, and A Warning on Merch. After a stint as creative director at an IT company, she now works as a service planner and storyteller, designing, interpreting, and documenting worlds.

 

Written by Jang Dongseok (Book Critic)

He reads books and writes. Captivated by the vast, deep world of books, he reads against the clock and works out how what he reads connects to our society. He is currently throwing himself into turning books, an endless source of content, into cultural content of every kind. His books include The Living Library, The Rebirth of Forbidden Books, The Birth of Different Thoughts, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: A Story Renewed After a Thousand Years, and Meeting World Classics for the First Time: A Guide for Teens.