Appearing first in its Korean original as 동네에서 제일 싼 프랑스(Seoul: Moonji Publishing) in 2017, The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry Books, 2023) is avant-garde poet Seo Jung Hak’s second collection, and his debut in the Anglosphere. To me, as a writer and reader of prose poetry and its permutations from the Arabic qaṣīdat al-nathr to the Japanese sanbunshi, Seo’s writings move with the silken grace of the Korean sanmunsi tradition. Forged by turn-of-the-century poets like Han Yong-un, Jeong Ji-yong, and Joo Yo-han, the sanmunsi found fertile ground when Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Threshold’ was rendered into the Korean as ‘Munŏgu’ by the poet and publisher Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, published in the October 1914 issue of the literary journal Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth). The sanmunsi later became, as The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry notes, a ‘notable . . . form, redolent of the aestheticism then intriguing Korean writers’.
Seo Jung Hak reimagines the sanmunsi through ‘paper box’ poems and absurdist tales, crafting language and aesthetics to uncover the poetic in the mundane and to confront globalisation’s homogenising agenda. His translator, Megan Sungyoon, frames his work as a recycling of ‘the rhetoric of outdated ideology and bureaucracy, late capitalism and unrelenting consumerism, and hyper-commercialized culture industry to make an ironic patchwork of languages of the past and present’.
In this interview, I spoke with Seo and Sungyoon, both in Seoul, about the sanmunsi, The Cheapest France in Town, and the ways in which one can resist linguistic homogeneity.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Jung Hak, can you take us through the years between 1999—when the earliest poems in The Cheapest France in Town began taking shape—and 2017, when the collection was first published? What was your process while putting these poems together?
Seo Jung Hak (SJH): I have been writing poems since 1991. It took me a few years to publish my first poetry collection, and eighteen more years would pass until I published my second. Personal things happened in the meantime; I got married, had a child, wrote poems on commission for literary magazines, earned some money, bought a car, lost someone, and played lots of video games. Indeed, these things are not very interesting to talk about. My personal history may mean something to me, but not to most of the people reading this interview. I’ve just lived along the currents of the world, with enough swinging and swaying.
I thought I had done everything I wanted to do in my first book, 모험의 왕과 코코넛의 귀족들 (The King of Adventure and Aristocrats of Coconut), so I hadn’t really thought about a second. Somehow, however, The Cheapest France in Town came into the world, and I was glad that people somehow liked it. From my perspective, both these books unfurl similar stories in a similar way, so one could do without either. I’d probably feel the same about a third book if I am to write it. The Cheapest France in Town is a loosely connected series, and that’s because I had forgotten I had written certain poems, then had to revisit them to resume writing.
If I could make a living writing poetry, I would have published more books. But that’s difficult to come by as I roam about a niche outside the mainstream publishing industry, which is itself restricted to fifty million Korean speakers. So here I am.
AMMD: Megan, you said: ‘I decided to translate his work because I’d never come across anything quite like it in contemporary Korean poetry’, pointing out how Seo’s work exists in the fissures of what we know as poetry. Describing your translation process, you’ve mentioned ‘continuity’, ‘repetition’, ‘temporality’, and even compared Seo’s poetics to the popular word-chain game ggeutmalitgi (끝말잇기). Could you tell us a bit more about how you approached the poems in their Korean original and the choices you made along the way?
Megan Sungyoon (MS): I considered mentioning this in the translator’s note and thought better of it, but I came across The Cheapest France in Town in the summer of 2019, when the book had been in existence for no more than a couple of years. At that time, I had just finished my first semester in graduate school and was looking for a translation project to turn into my Master’s thesis; the book’s title immediately caught my attention amongst the hectic shelves of Seoul’s biggest bookstore.
While reading, the absurd humour of The Cheapest France in Town spoke to me with that overwhelming sensation of when you finally find something that you didn’t even know you were looking for. I think this anecdote pretty much sums up how I choose works to translate—they tend to happen upon me with this kind of inevitability. Of course, they don’t fall out of thin air, and I know where I should look to increase the chances of such magical encounters. Most often, I’m drawn to what people call experimental writing—works that explore and exploit the boundaries of language, be it generic, literary, or national. I believe the best approach to enjoy a work is to imagine that you created it yourself. In that sense, texts that come most naturally and effortlessly to me are the ones that are keenly aware of their manipulation of form—doubling, tripling down on that. As that’s how I conceive most of my own writing, I can join the works’ play without much difficulty.
Ggeutmalitgi (끝말잇기) was the form I imagined for my translation to amplify the source text’s repetition and continuity in English. I once played ggeutmalitgi with friends and realised how underwhelming the game is in English, as you can pretty much go on forever until you run out of words that start with a Y. The game ends much quicker in Korean, given that one of the players is likely to know a few killer words that guarantee a win. The Cheapest France in Town feels to me like a drawn-out, a posteriori ggeutmalitgi one plays with oneself, which begins with ‘France’ and goes back in time to recall the tenuously connected words. The collection progresses counter-chronologically, making an ars poetica out of both its sequentially and temporally last poems. No one ever remembers what word they began ggeutmalitgi with; only the word that ends the game matters.
AMMD: When we talk about the Korean sanmunsi, names like Yi Sang, Chu Yo-han, Choi Seung-ho, Kim Kwang-kyu, and Kim Chung-mi pop up. How does The Cheapest France in Town and Seo’s oeuvre speak to this sanmunsi tradition?
SJH: Poetry as a genre is attractive. You can write and read it with as much difficulty or ease as you like. I think poems cannot contain too much information as they’re usually short, and the attention span required for reading poetry also tends to be short compared to other genres of literature. It is easy to write easily and be read easily, but it is difficult to write easily and be read as difficult, or to write something difficult that can be read easily.
The most prominent characteristic of modern Korean poetry is its untethering from formal constraints. At the moment—as is with everything in South Korea—modern Korean poetry encompasses many different ideas and beliefs, overlapping or compressed. The past, present, and future are all laid atop one another. It is a society whose ‘contemporary’ trends are extremely hard to specify, so often, what had looked great yesterday is annoying today, and it’s not easy for poems (not all of them but some of them) to keep their values. What’s also attractive about ‘modern poetry’ is that although it obviously has a set of rules, it’s hard to define what those rules are exactly.
Most poems I write these days are not intended to be in a certain form, prosaic or otherwise. When I first wrote poems, I thought they needed to look like poems and was hyper-conscious of the forms I used, but this self-consciousness went away after publishing my first poetry collection and earning the title of a poet. What a poet writes and publishes is a poem even when it doesn’t look like a poem. As the audiences at contemporary art museums accept installations and performances as art—when even a piece of garbage left on the floor might garner unexpected attention—whatever a poet writes becomes a poem. This is a good thing to me.
Other writers of prose poems might work in that form because it is useful to them in some way. To me, form doesn’t seem to have much meaning. In any case, however, I do have an understanding that what I write is poetry.
MS: Sanmunsi translates literally to ‘prose poem’; ‘sanmun’ means prose and ‘si’ means a poem or poetry. To my understanding, the term came into being because Korean academics and writers needed something to translate the prose poetry imported from Europe, mainly France, between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In this sense, the categorisation of sanmunsi is itself a direct translation and cultural import from the ‘centre’ of the global literary world.
My knowledge of sanmunsi is limited to contemporary South Korean poetry (I don’t know much about the tradition that predates the colonial period), but I think writing poems without formal constraints has long been present in Korean literature. Thus, I’m not sure if this categorisation holds much water in the Korean context other than the fact that it was—and still is to some extent—useful in translating a different literary tradition. From what I’ve observed, form is no longer a primary concern or topic of discussion for most Korean poets, and ‘freeform’ poetry, which dominates contemporary Korean poetry, often ends up looking indistinguishable from what we call prose poetry or sanmunsi. Jung Hak’s answer to this question might also reflect such a sentiment when he says he no longer feels particularly conscious about form. In short, I don’t think the label of sanmunsi can accurately describe the subtle, less formally oriented genre distinctions in contemporary Korean poetry, as the majority of it falls into this categorisation. Yi Sang, for example, has an extraordinary sensibility to form, but labeling his works as ‘prose poems’ feels inadequate to me, although some of his poems do have such qualities.
AMMD: Jung Hak, you were Kim Hyesoon’s student at the famed Seoul Institute of the Arts, and in her blurb to The Cheapest France in Town, Don Mee Choi even compares your ‘paper box’ poems with that of Kim’s ‘pinkbox’ poems. Were you, in any way, influenced by Kim? And what about other Global Majority, Asian, or Korean poets, scholars, writers, and thinkers whose work has shaped your philosophy, your writing, and the way you approach things?
SJH: It’s natural for all writers to be influenced by their predecessors, and we’re obliged to be aware of that. I have been influenced by all the works I’ve ever read, including Kim Hyesoon’s. Here, I might as well list my favorite authors as examples: internationally-known writers such as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Stephen King, as well as Korean writers like Oh Kyu-won, Hwang Ji-u, and Jang Kyeong-rin, to name a few.
I’m undoubtedly influenced by everything in the world: films, TV dramas, mangas and games, classical and popular music, the kids sitting next to me on the bus, a single line in a post on the internet, how the world is organised and in what systems it operates, how the present flows into the future—all these things intrigue me from time to time. I’ll sometimes read other people’s opinions, or else just ruminate over them in my daily life, to understand the world.
AMMD: Megan, in your translator’s note, you mentioned those ‘initial attempts at linguistic homogenisation’, something that really hits home for me and plenty of other Global Majority translators coming from hypernationalist nation-states. As someone from the Global South working in a dominant language such as English, how do we actually decolonise translation and publishing? How can we turn this fraught legacy into something that empowers rather than extracts?
MS: Theodor W. Adorno notoriously stated that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. When tragedy surpasses one’s imagination, it can and often does feel pointless—and even immoral—to engage in activities that do not have immediate political impacts. Korean literature, and in turn, South Korean literature, had suffered from its own perceived powerlessness during and after the colonial era, as well as the war and political genocide that ensued.
Ultranationalism is a condition observable in many nations that have undergone colonial oppression, and one of its symptoms is an intolerance to anything that is not deemed ‘us’. Therefore, it was of utmost import for early South Korean writers to sound just right in ‘our voice’, which was implied to be ethnic Korean and mostly male (whereas the country—’Motherland’—was often considered female). It is still quite unusual to see a work of Korean-language literature by someone who’s not ethnically Korean. I recently came across an anthology of poems written by Nepalese factory workers in South Korea, and I don’t see any good reason not to consider these poems ‘Korean’, as many of the poems speak of Korean society, which has openly and actively participated in the global neoliberal economy and its exploitation of migrant workers. Nevertheless, I probably don’t even need to mention that the presence of these workers is rarely, if ever, acknowledged as an actual part of South Korean society by both the media and general public alike. Colonialism has done terrible things to Korean culture—as it has to any culture, really—and the result is a general obsession over the national image, which is so often, if not always, determined by the Western gaze. The nationalist effort to rediscover what is ‘Korean’ has been tenacious and rampant, and has unfortunately involved drawing unequivocal lines between who among us are rightfully ‘us’ and who aren’t. And this austere postcolonial nation-building, aggravated by the other political turmoil that followed, has affected the society as a whole, including the culture industry.
As someone who is incredibly privileged to be given opportunities to translate Korean literature into the lingua franca that is English, I make deliberate choices to translate texts that are ‘different’ from the standard Korean and global mainstream literary discourse. Thankfully, the works I’m naturally drawn to usually fall into this category. However, as important to me as putting minor tones and aesthetics on the map of global Korean literature is recognising and attending to the presence of those who are invisible within this industry, culture, and society that I’m fortunate to traverse more or less freely. Also in that regard, I admire and resonate with Asymptote’s mission to publish world literature through the conscious effort to reflect its true form and shape.
AMMD: South Korea is known worldwide because of its pop music and media industry, the Hallyu wave having become a ‘powerful cultural currency’, to quote from Megan’s translator’s note. What about poets? Are there Korean poets, modern or from antiquity, whom you wish to be read more globally or translated further?
SJH: I don’t think ‘modern poetry’ is necessarily something that everyone should read, nor would that be possible. In my opinion, ‘stories’ that everyone can read and resonate with are scarce but receive a lot of media attention, giving writers certain reasons to pursue writing them. Compared to popular music, movies, and TV, poetry is difficult to consume and its outreach is naturally limited; therefore, I think there’s little chance that poetry will be considered a part of a ‘powerful cultural currency’.
It should be enough for poets and poetry to be barely noticed, like a stain on a carpet, seldom and in passing. Wouldn’t it be enough for poetry to remain as something that doesn’t really serve any function, something without a definite meaning? Of course, this wouldn’t guarantee the genre’s survival at the industrial level. That’s probably why most poets cannot make a decent living by writing poems.
There are many excellent works by young Korean poets. The poems in the present continuous tense, which are just coming out into the world, are incredibly good. I’m not sure, to be honest, why so many wonderfully talented people in Korea like and write poetry, but they’re great nonetheless. I like poems written today more than ones written yesterday. I hope the poems of now, rather than of ancient times, are translated and read—because the sparkles of these precious works don’t last very long.
AMMD: These days, translators like Don Mee Choi, Anton Hur, and Jack Jung have gained well-deserved recognition in the North Atlantic. But who are some other Korean translators you think readers shouldn’t miss out on?
MS: I should begin by mentioning that I have tremendous respect and gratitude for the translators you named here for expanding the horizon of global Korean literature. Another translator who I think should also be mentioned here is Emily Yae Won, who has translated celebrated works of Korean literature, such as Hwang Jungeun’s dd’s Umbrella and Han Kang’s Greek Lessons. I’m especially interested in her work because she translates both ways, from Korean to English and vice versa. The list of titles she has translated into Korean is also admirable and growing, including Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, and it inspires me very much to see an established translator who translates both ways so successfully.
Although primarily in Japanese, I’m also grateful for Morgan Giles’s translation of Yu Miri, as it was my entryway into someone who is now one of my favorite writers. In particular, I was recently awestruck by Giles’s translation of The End of August, which must have required an incredible amount of linguistic and cultural research in both Japanese and Korean. Diasporic works, such as Yu Miri’s, often pose poignant questions about what Korean or any national literature is, through their thematic and formal approaches to the intricate process of identifying with a nation and a national language. I believe the keen critical sensibility toward how a state defines its acceptable subjects is crucial to navigating this era we’re living in.
However, when appealing to US and British audiences is perceived to be the be-all and end-all of any artistic endeavor in South Korea (and I imagine in a lot of other countries that are not part of the dominant Anglophone culture), one caveat is that we should not forget that literary translation is at first a creative pursuit. I respect all translators as artists of their own merit and am grateful to be able to call them my colleagues, no matter the preference of the few elite markets. In that regard, I’m interested in learning more about the works of translators who translate Korean literature into languages that are not often under the limelight of international celebration. Volumes of Korean literature have been translated into Indonesian, for example, and in Korea, we rarely, if ever, hear any news regarding that. I’m curious about how different cultures interact with Korean literature, about the unique challenges of translating it into each language and culture, and how different or similar those challenges are to the ones I have as someone translating Korean into English.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Korean poetry, for instance, which anthologies, collections, and works would you wish to include as key texts? Can you name some poets that you would be inclined to incorporating to this imaginary syllabus?
SJH: Though I don’t want to teach a course on poetry, if I do end up doing so, I would find it hard to keep the balance between the poems I like and the poems I should teach. As I’m not the biggest fan of ‘classical’ poetry, let’s say that I’ll teach modern and contemporary Korean poetry. I would like to read and discuss the poems of Yi Sang, Baek Seok, Kim Su-yeong, Kim Chunsu, Hwang Ji-u, Oh Kyu-won, Choi Seung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, Ham Min-bok, and the like. If I teach a course for aspiring poets, I’ll probably use books that are hot off the press, books on the ‘new releases’ shelves in bookstores, books that still smell like ink. And I would recommend that they read a lot, no matter what kind of work.
I feel like Korea has a much more than ‘adequate’ number of both writers and readers of poetry. Considering the wide range of styles, breadths, depths, and sheer volumes, there must coexist the excitement and frustration of making one’s own selections as a reader. It wouldn’t be easy to teach a course on Korean poetry while properly accounting for such ranges and breadths.
For sure, not all poems created each year are ‘good poems’. However, where to draw that line is up to each reader. And I wouldn’t be able to locate that line for my students; it would require an infallible standard, and I am at once generous and biased. If I teach poetry, my students will hobble and complain endlessly.
MS: This question is interesting because, by answering it, I’m defining what I think Korean poetry is, albeit indirectly. Translating Korean poetry does allow me some insightful access into its scope and history (or the breadths and depths, as Jung Hak calls them), yet I am by no means qualified to teach Korean poetry. So this is my wild guess at what constitutes a Korean poetry course syllabus.
To be consistent with what I have said in this interview so far, I’d like to focus on different strains of modern and contemporary Korean language (the periodic restriction is due to my relative unfamiliarity with other time periods). In fact, all the works I’ve mentioned so far in this interview would be included in my syllabus. I might start with Yi Sang and a recently published selection of his work translated by Don Mee Choi and Jack Jung, as well as Sawako Nakayasu and Joyelle McSweeney, two other translators whom I also greatly admire; he could represent the proto-avant-garde, because he was pretty singular in his pursuit and his avant-gardism didn’t become a movement, and he could also be read in comparison with his more lyrical contemporaries like Yoon Dong-ju and Seo Jeong-ju. The wildly divergent political stances of these poets would also be an interesting topic of discussion.
The works of Yu Miri and different generations of Zainichi Korean (descendants of colonial Koreans in Japan) writers would be next, as they constitute invaluable materials for a comparative study of ‘Korean’ identity’s colonial aftermath in literature, especially if read in parallel with Yi Sang and his contemporaries (I’m fully aware that Zainichi Korean works are mostly in Japanese, and Yu Miri is not technically a ‘poet’, but all these categories exhaust me. This is my imaginary syllabus!). This would be followed by other ethnic Korean poets in the diaspora who may or not use Korean in their writing, along with contemporary Korean poets in translation; nonethnic Korean writers writing in Korean and/or in the context of Korean society; and poetry and experimental writing in contemporary vernacular Korean.
I decided not to give specific examples other than the ones I’ve already mentioned above because, now that I think of it, I might teach this class in the future. Who knows? One can certainly dream. . .
Seo Jung Hak’s responses were translated from the Korean into English by Megan Sungyoon.
Seo Jung Hak made his debut on the Korean literary scene when his four poems, including ‘Hideout’ (은신처), were published in the Winter 1995 issue of 문학과 사회 (Literature and Society). His first poetry collection, 모험의 왕과 코코넛의 귀족들 (The King of Adventure and Aristocrats of Coconut), was published in 1998 by Moonji Publishing Co., one of the biggest literary publishers in South Korea. The Cheapest France in Town (동네에서 제일 싼 프랑스) is his second book of poetry published in 2017, also by Moonji.
Megan Sungyoon translates between languages and across genres. The English translator of Seo Jung Hak’s The Cheapest France in Town (World Poetry Books, 2023) and the Korean translator of Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt (Workroom Press, forthcoming), Sungyoon also has works published in the Notre Dame Review, Copper Nickel, Asymptote, SAND Journal, and The Margins, among others. Currently based in Seoul, Sungyoon holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation from Columbia University.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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