Latest news with #WeDoNotPart
Korea Herald
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Han Kang's latest 'Light and Thread' brings meditative reflections on life while tending small garden
The latest books by Han Kang, last year's Nobel Prize in literature winner, will be released today, her first publication since winning the prize. "Light and Thread" is a collection of meditative essays with five poems that takes its name from her Nobel lecture, delivered Dec. 7 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The lecture starts the slim volume. The 172-page collection was available for preorder starting Wednesday and will be released in bookstores beginning Thursday, according to Moonji Publishing. "Light and Thread" brings together 12 pieces, including five poems and several essays, accompanied by photos taken by Han. The book is released as part of the publisher's essay series "Ecrire" (to write in French), which curates the prose of literary writers noted for their distinctive styles. The prose and poetry collection was discussed with the author during the early planning stages of the series in 2019, according to the publisher, with the theme and concept taking final shape by December 2024. "We hope this will be a precious opportunity to meet writer(s), whom readers have only read through their polished literary works, in a more intimate and personal ways," the book's editor said to The Korea Herald. 3 pieces from Nobel Prize ceremony Three of the pieces in the collection are related to the Nobel Prize ceremony: the full text of her Nobel lecture at the Swedish Academy, her banquet speech titled "In the Darkest Night" delivered Dec. 10 and a short message she wrote when donating a teacup to the Nobel Museum, titled "Small Teacup." Regarding the teacup, Han wrote that the teacup was part of her daily routine while she was writing "We Do Not Part." She described her work routine: After getting up at 5:30 a.m. and going for a walk, she would drink a cup of tea. She drank black tea although the cup was designed for drinking green tea. "We Do Not Part" follows two women as they navigate intergenerational trauma and shared mourning for relatives lost to state violence, in the shadow of a massacre that took place on South Korea's Jeju Island in the late 1940s. It took seven years to complete the book. 'As the teacup is so small, I didn't need to take in too much caffeine. It was like very warm medicine for me, which helped me to write on,' said Han. One of the essays, "After Publication," was written in 2022, shortly after the release of "We Do Not Part." It was previously released in "The Essential: Han Kang," a special edition curated by Munhakdongne Publishing that brings together highlights from the author's key works. 5 poems after her first poetry collection It is now well known that before Han made her prose debut in 1995 with the short story collection "Love of Yeosu," she began her literary career in 1993 by publishing several poems in the literary magazine "Literature and Society." The latest collection includes five poems that originally appeared in "Literature and Society" and "Littor" between 2013 and 2024, following the publication of her first and only poetry collection, "I Put the Evening in the Drawer" (2013, Moonji Publishing). The five poems are: "The Coat and I," "North-Facing Room," "(Meditation on Pain)," "Sound(s)" and "Very Small Snowflake." 3 unpublished intimate reflections while tending garden Also included are three previously unpublished essays: "North-Facing Garden," "Garden Diary" and "After Living On." "North-Facing Garden" recounts Han's experience tending to a small garden in the first home she ever purchased under her own name -- a house with a four-pyeong (roughly 13 square meters) yard. Here, she writes about the challenge of growing plants without direct sunlight, and how, in her effort to reflect light into the space using a mirror, she began to grasp the Earth's rotation in a new, embodied way. "Garden Diary" follows in a more meditative, intimate format, chronicling her experiences in the garden day by day. The final piece in the book, "After Living On," is a two-page lyrical essay, where every sentence stands on its own line. The photo on the last page of the book features a poem Han wrote at the age of eight, which she referenced during her "Light and Thread" lecture, describing it as 'suitably innocent and unpolished (lines),' penned by her 8-year-old self. Where is love? It is inside my thump-thumping beating chest. What is love? It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts. Meanwhile, Han is also putting the finishing touches on a long-awaited novel -- the final installment in her so-called 'Winter Trilogy.' The new work is expected to be released later this year and will follow the short stories "While a Single Snowflake Melts" and "Farewell." Together, the three stories form an interconnected narrative. Han had been working on the final volume -- a midlength novel -- before her Nobel win.
New York Times
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Let's Talk About Han Kang's ‘We Do Not Part'
The novel 'We Do Not Part,' by the Nobel laureate Han Kang, involves a pet-sitting quest gone surreal: It follows a writer and documentarian whose hospitalized friend beseeches her to take care of her stranded pet parakeet on an island hundreds of miles away. When she arrives, the writer finds not only the bird but also an apparition of her friend, who has a devastating history to tell. Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, 'We Do Not Part' is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today. (Han's 2016 novel, 'The Vegetarian,' won the International Booker Prize and was chosen as one of The New York Times's Best Books of the 21st Century.) On this week's episode, the Book Club host MJ Franklin discusses 'We Do Not Part' with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Emily Eakin. You can follow along, and add your own comments to the discussion here. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@
Korea Herald
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Japanese translator of Han Kang's 'We Do Not Part' receives Yomiuri Literary Award
Japanese translator Saito Mariko has won the Research and Translation category at the 76th Yomiuri Literary Awards for her Japanese translation of 'We Do Not Part' by 2024 Nobel Prize in literature winner Han Kang, according to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea on Thursday. Considered one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards, the Yomiuri Literary Award is presented annually in six categories: Fiction, Play/Screenplay, Essay/Travelogue, Criticism/Biography, Poetry (including Haiku), and Research/Translation. This marks the first time a single translated work by a Korean author has won in this category. Earlier, in 1990, Ibaraki Noriko won the 42nd Yomiuri Literary Award in the same category for her translation of 'Selected Works of Modern Korean Poetry.' The award recognizes books published in Japan between November of the previous year and November of the awarding year, with a prize of 2 million yen ($13,500). This year's award ceremony took place on Tuesday at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. 'We Do Not Part,' a 2021 novel by Han, previously won the French Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature and the Medicis Prize. Saito has also translated several other works by the Korean author, including 'The White Book,' 'Greek Lessons' and 'I Put the Evening in the Drawer.' In addition to Han Kang's works, she has translated over 30 Korean literary works since 2014, including Cho Nam-joo's 'Kim Ji-young, Born 1982,' as well as works by Jung Se-rang, Kim Bo-young and Cheon Myeong-kwan. She is also active as a poet in Japan.
Asia Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asia Times
In We Do Not Part, Han Kang faces historical traumas with compassion
It's daunting to review a novel written by someone who, in 2024, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for Han Kang's 'intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life': a description that applies equally to this newly translated work. We Do Not Part tells the story of Kyungha, a writer of 20th-century South Korean history, and her longterm friend Inseon, a documentary filmmaker and photographer. Both women are increasingly choosing isolation over the busy professional and social lives they had lived. Kyungha has pretty much withdrawn from her professional life. She is suffering from depression and anxiety, restless nights and exhausted solitary days. She is losing contact with those she loves. Inseon had moved from Seoul to the remote island of Jeju several years earlier to care for her ageing mother. After her mother's death, she chose to remain on the island and switch from screen-based work to furniture-making. The novel is told in three parts. The long first section, titled Bird, opens with a dream sequence. It goes on to recount a comparatively linear narrative of past and present. The shorter middle part, Night, is a deep dive into the horrors of history. The ending, Flame, is very short, told in fragments. The novel ends with what seems to be a dream, where the two women light a candle in the dark, in the depths of snow. The dream that opens the novel is of 'thousands of black tree trunks jutted from the earth.… Stooped and listing, they gave the impression of a thousand men, women and haggard children huddling in the snow.' Trees that represent people; children who are haggard: these are worryingly bleak images. In the distorted reality of the dreamworld, Kyungha wonders: 'Was this a graveyard? … Are those gravestones?' The dream moves on, and she finds that she is walking through water. First her feet are wet, then she is ankle-deep, and then the 'graves' are underwater, being washed away by the sea, and she alone must try to preserve any that can be saved. This sets the stage for all that is to come: evidence of massacres, nature turned into a stage for terrible events, a bone-chilling awareness of sorrow. This might sound like an unpromising entry point for a novel, but let me assure readers that the story offers real rewards. I was a touch undone by the first chapters, but the beauty of the prose kept me going. The thoughtful, engaging portraits of the generosity, integrity and courage of the two key characters, too, provided an appealing path on which to follow the narrative. In the early chapters, Kyungha presents as a person suffering from PTSD. She has been flirting with death for some time. What is keeping her alive is that she can't find a way to write what she believes to be 'a proper letter of farewell, a true leavetaking.' The elements and circumstances seem to conspire against her peace. Through the novel's first chapters, Kyungha is surviving a hot humid summer. All she is able to do is shower, shred the drafts of her farewell letters, and lie on the floor imagining snow. She has been brought to this point as a result of her researching and writing about a massacre in a place she names G— (perhaps Gwangju, the site of a massacre in May 1980, which Han Kang addressed in her 2014 novel Human Acts). Kyungha's account of how she is – barely – managing day-to-day life reads like a textbook case of vicarious trauma. She speculates that translating the dream-image into an art work might break its grip. Kyungha approaches Inseon, who has a long record of producing interesting if financially unviable projects. Inseon agrees to collaborate with her on this dream project. But four years go by without them ever managing to synchronise their schedules or begin the work. Then, after some months of silence, a text from Inseon pings into Kyungha's phone. It asks her to come to a Seoul hospital. Inseon is there, being treated for an accident involving an electric saw. She has turned to her old friend to ask Kyungha to travel to Jeju and save her budgie, which will otherwise die of thirst. The novel then enters what can loosely be read as a quest narrative. It is now mid-winter and a wild snowstorm is on the way. Inseon's home is in a village a long way from the airport, and snow is threatening to shut down the roads. Nonetheless, Kyungha agrees to take up the quest. She finds herself in an unfamiliar location with a looming frightening weather event and no practical knowledge about how to reach Inseon's home. As she struggles to reach the destination, she finds herself spiraling like the snow in this winter storm. There is neither precision nor even clarity here: Much as the story leaps back through decades, then feels its way back to now, Kyungha stumbles through a landscape that she cannot map and plunges precipitately off the paths. Snowdrifts obscure the roads and 'snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage and sweep over the sea.' Scratched, bruised and almost frozen, Kyungha finds herself at Inseon's door, where she is completely isolated: 'When I looked back,' she says, 'the lone path that bore my deep footprints lay in silence.' And there she remains, trapped by the weather, haunted by the stories of those she had interviewed for her book on the G— massacre. Stories of running from bullets, bodies being piled up, hiding for years in forests and caves: all the unendurable things that people nonetheless endured. The second part of the novel begins with a version of the initial dream of the sea and tree trunks that are metaphors of the dead. Kyungha wakes from this dream to find herself in a sort of ontological uncertainty. Inseon has (impossibly) joined her at the cottage. Kyungha can't determine whether this is another dream, or if Inseon has died and is visiting her as a spirit, or if she herself has died is only imagining that she is alive and present. What is not in doubt, though, is the historical record. Kyungha finds that she is not the only person who has been researching state-sanctioned massacres. Inseon has been busy investigating what is known as the April 3rd uprising and the long massacre that followed from 1947 to 1954. This massacre was organized and undertaken by the US military and the new Republic of Korea, based on the flawed notion that the Jeju islanders were communists. It resulted in the deaths of around 30,000 people. Citizens of Jeju awaiting execution, May 1948. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Nietzsche warned that 'if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you'. Han Kang's version of this idea is, as she writes in We Do Not Part, that 'looking squarely at the injury made it all the more excruciating'. Here it is Inseon's nightmares that dominate: This is where her family and people died and where their traces remain. But both women are carriers of nightmare stories. Both stagger under the weight. They have both looked squarely at the excruciating injuries of state-sanctioned murder and they carry the wounds of those histories. This is an issue Han Kang has been tracing through her novels. Her stories engage, one way or another, with the problem of violence. As she writes in Human Acts, she sees the tendency to 'uniform brutality' as something 'imprinted in our genetic code.' But she also notes, in her Nobel Lecture, that we humans 'simultaneously stand opposite such overwhelming violence.' Yes, we do terrible things, but we also do generous and compassionate things. We live simultaneously in the scarred world of human history and in the less-damaged natural world. We Do Not Part portrays massacres and trauma, contrasted with trees and seawater, walks in forests and glorious hymns to snow. It is a novel that depicts a beautiful world, one worth living in, and for. It is a novel that looks, perhaps too squarely, at recent history, while finding consolation in small acts of kindness and community, and in the assurance that, however we understand the phrase, we do not part. Jen Webb is a distinguished professor of creative practice in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Read ‘We Do Not Part,' by Han Kang, With the Book Review
Humanity has a funny relationship with history: We never quite know what to do with it. Let the past be the past, some say. If we don't learn from history, we're doomed to repeat it, others counter. But history doesn't care what we want; it will make its presence known, whether we like it or not. That's certainly the case in the Nobel laureate Han Kang's new book, 'We Do Not Part.' The novel, which was translated by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, is a pet-sitting quest gone surreal. The story follows Kyungha, a writer and documentarian who is summoned to a hospital in Seoul by her close friend and former collaborator, Inseon. Inseon, it turns out, has sliced off her fingertips while working in her carpentry workshop. She's now stuck in the hospital undergoing a painful treatment that will keep her bedridden for weeks. Worried about her pet parakeet, Ama, who was abandoned at home in the emergency and has most certainly run out of food, Inseon asks Kyungha to travel to her house and care for the bird. The only issue? Inseon's house is hundreds of miles away, on the island of Jeju, and there's a blizzard barreling toward it that will soon cut off access to the area. Despite the perilous trip, Kyungha makes it, but once there, she doesn't just find the bird. She also finds an apparition of Inseon, who has a devastating history to tell. Transforming real life into a haunting dreamscape, 'We Do Not Part' is about grief, tragedy, the weight of the past, and the painful but essential work of remembering, delivered by one of the most electrifying writers working today. (Han's 2016 novel, 'The Vegetarian,' won the International Booker Prize and was recently named one of The New York Times's Best Books of the 21st Century.) In March, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss 'We Do Not Part,' by Han Kang. We'll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on March 28, and we'd love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by March 20, and we may mention your observations in the episode. Here's some related reading to get you started: We can't wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
