Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2011
1 It is for this reason that I do not consider in this article English-language novel translations published in Korea. Such translations date to the early 1980s, but none has been marketed in the West; most were commissioned by funding agencies in Seoul, and their production values and the quality of the translations would put them at a disadvantage in the overseas book market.
2 It is perhaps for these reasons that when O Chŏng-hŭi's Sae (reviewed here in its translation, The Bird) was first published in 1996 by Munhak kwa chisŏng sa, it was labeled sosŏl, “fiction”; not until it was published in a revised edition by the same publisher in 2009 was it labeled changp'yŏn sosŏl, “novel.” I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, for its part, though labeled changp'yŏn sosŏl in its original Korean edition, from Munhak tongne, is only 116 pages in English translation.
3 See my reviews of this translation in Pacific Rim Review of Books, no. 8 (Spring 2008): 33Google Scholar; and Translation Review 79 (2010): 79–80Google Scholar.