Yi Ok (1760–1815)

李鈺 이옥 Yi Ok¹ is not a household name in Korea and is all but absent from World Literature, only a few lines of his poetry having been translated from the original into English, to the best of my knowledge, and a selection of his prose into German in 2010.² His work has, however, been translated into Korean; or, at least, paraphrased in Korean. It might seem odd that a Korean writer requires translation into Korean, but, in fact, a great many Korean writers require such translation. Until the end of the nineteenth century most Korean poetry was written using Chinese characters, although centuries earlier King Sejong the Great (1397–1450) had brought about the invention of a native Korean script (he may even have devised it himself). The 兩班 양반 yangban literati class³ was resistant to this new script (today called 한글 hangeul, which means “great script,” but is also a homonym for “Korean script”), because the years of training required for proficiency in reading and writing Chinese characters restricted literacy and therefore access to knowledge and through it power. Only in 1894 was hangeul mandated for official state documents (Sohn, 29). One of the ironies of this resistance to hangeul, which is today celebrated in Korea as a brilliant indigenous invention, right up there with kimchi (every provincial or municipal museum of Korean culture devotes a great deal of space to both), is that few Koreans today can read the classics of Korean Literature in the original. That Yi Ok must be paraphrased for the non-specialist Korean reader is therefore not as strange as it might at first seem.