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"Red Sword" Bora Chung - Author's Note: historical background and motivation (my translation)
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I picked up the Red Sword book today at the book-launch event in Hongdae, Seoul. (See: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...).
I notice that the translator, Anton Hur, omitted (did not translate) the Author's Note. He explained that he usually does not translate Author's Notes (with a notable exception for Your Utopia, also by Bora Chung).
The Red Sword Author's Note is therefore ONLY available in English here! I hope people enjoy it and get some use out of this, whoever may be reading.
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At the book-launch event, Bora Chung spoke a bit about the inspiration and background of writing the book, basically quoting from the contents of her own Author's Note.
For most of the 2010s, she explained, she had been a university lecturer. Most of her classes dealt with topics related to Russia (of which she is a specialist). One of her classes dealt with early Russia-Korea contacts. This now-obscure 1650s clash was one of the centerpieces of the course. She was absolutely delighted to discover someone had made a novel out of the story in the 18th century. That course-material eventually inspired Red Sword, along with the knowledge that the story had already made transformed into a novel several times, but back in the Chosun period when literature was much different (no one thought to "do sci-fi" back then, for one).
Bora Chung stressed also, at the event, that her recent memories of the Sewol Ferry Disaster protests (2014-15?), which culminated in some confrontations in April 2015 (around the one-year anniversary of the disaster), were a key to some of the action scenes, or more, in Red Sword.
Most of Bora Chung's verbal explanation was quite in line with the contents published in the January-2019 Author's Note (that I've translated here). When speaking, some emphases are bound to differ, sometimes more than one might want it to.
Thanks that is really helpful. I do wish translators would translate - or publishers commission them to do so which might be more the barrier - author’s afterwords. They seem even more necessary in translation than the original. A translator’s note is always appreciated as well.
Mod
With our group's discussion of Red Sword coming soon, I push this to the front.
I do think the Author's Note is highly useful to have read before reading Red Sword. A lot of the story being "re-told" makes more sense that way, while also allowing an appreciation of the sci-fi goals at hand.
Peter wrote: ":With our group's discussion of Red Sword coming soon, I push this to the front.
I do think the Author's Note is highly useful to have read before reading Red Sword. A lot of the story being "re..."
Thanks so much for posting your translation of Bora Chung’s Note in the original 2019 Korean version of Red Sword. I read both Cursed Bunny and Your Utupia when they came out, and even though I could appreciate the social values which showed through in some of the stories (most memorably for me, “To meet her”, which closed Your Utopia), the stories generally didn’t have what it takes to overcome my strong preference of the long (novel) over the short (short story) format. But now I will have a chance to see what she does with the long form, and I can’t wait to get the copy of Red Arrow I ordered and plunge in. (BTW the paperback version does not seem to have a US publisher and seems to be available only as an import from the UK.)
But in the meantime I am curious about two things that you may be able to shed light on. The first has to do with the Joseon period texts she mentions. I was able to identify Sin Ryu’s (now Yu’s) personal account of the 1658 expedition against the Russians in Heilongjiang as his Bukjeongnok “Record of the Northern Expedition” (北征錄, written in literary Chinese).
However I could not find any references (in English) to later tales (soseol), war tales (gundam soseol) or other, that are based on the account. Does Chung name them in a note or whatever, or do you know anything about them? There are hundreds of late Joseon period tales, some relating to events of the 16th and 17th centuries, including the famous "Tale of Lady Pak" (Bak ssi jeon) based on the Qing invasion of 1639, but I’ve never seen an extensive list with Korean and English titles and summaries.
The second question has to do with the Korean name for Sin Ryu’s two expeditions in Heilongjiang against the Russians in 1654 and 1658, Naseon Jeongbeol lit. "Suppression of the Russians". I’m not sure whether Sin Ryu used it himself in his Bukjeongnok, but modern historians use it, and give the Chinese character form as 羅禪征伐, which would be read in Mandarin as Luóchán zhēngfá “Luóchán conquest”. The word:
Naseon (older Raseon) "Russians" (seen only in Naseon Jeongbeol?)
is written with the characters 羅 (나/라 na/ra Mand luó “sieve, net”) + 禪 (선 Mand chán “meditation, zen”), which are clearly being used as phonograms (i.e. used for their sounds with complete disregard for their meanings). But there is also another word:
naseon (older raseon) "spiral, helix" (also Mand luóxuán, Jap rasen)
which is written with the characters 螺 (나/라 na/ra Mand luó “(aquatic) snail; whorl; swirl; spiral”) + 旋 (선 Mand xuán “revolve, go around”),
I go into all these details because I noticed so many references to spirals and helixes in English language discussions of Red Sword and wondered whether they originate in a creative jump made by the author from the rare word Naseon "Russians" of Naseon Jeongbeol to the common word naseon "spiral, helix". Do you know if she says anything about it in her book, or does the translator, Anton Hur, say anything about it? And do you have an opinion yourself?
Mod
Hi, John, thanks for "writing in" (as people used to say).
You ask if Bora Chung names the 18th-century story/stories ("so-seol/소설) which were re-tellings of the 1650s Russia-Korea-China encounter/clash. I don't think she did name the stories in the Author's Note. (These 18th-century novels, several derivative variants?)
The story she refers to is "The Story of Bae Shi-hwang" (배시황전/裵是愰傳). I think the idea is the fictionalized Bae Shi-hwang was based on Shin Yu, whom Bora Chung discusses much in her Author's Note.
There looks to be possibly be ZERO on this obscure old story in English online. It's obscure enough even in Korean that Bora Chung didn't complicate her already-rather-long Author's Note with direct reference to it.
Here is The Story of Bae Shi-Hwang's entry in the "Encylopedia of Korean Culture":
https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E...
There may be some conjecture and historical reconstruction going on with tracing the origins and evolutions of these stories, as: (1.) many early copies of such stories must have been lost, and (2.) the oral tradition mixed freely with the written tradition and probably superseded it in many cases. But with this story we have an interesting book-end to the origin-event for the later story: the 1650s campaigns towards the Amur River and encounters with the Russians.
The Encyclopedia of Korean History entry has it that a reliably datable full version of The Story of Bae Shi-Hwang that survives was committed to text and printed and disseminated in 1867. This 1867 printing was fully in Hangul, notable for the period. I do wonder how many people that 1867 print-run reached.
It is known, anwyay, that that 1867 text was copied from earlier text(s), and not solely because the source-event was 200 years earlier. Evidence of an 18th-century diffusion of the story seems to exist, and the low status of Hangul may have contributed to the lack of high-prestige preservation.
I presume that Bora Chung, a scholar of these things (although now a full-time writer and world-tourer for book-promotion, occasionally finding time to write and translate), was not making up a novel theory in dating the start of the "so-seol"-ization of the story to around the early-18th century.
A modernized version of the Story of Bae Shi-Hwang was published in 1984. I doubt many ordinary Koreans today have heard of it or, whether those (few?) do claim to have have heard of it can say anything about it other than that it's old!
Mod
Also, John, on your proposal of a possible connection between the meaning "spiral, helix" of the word "나선" and the "나선정벌" as appearing in the Author's Note ("나선정벌" is the leading word of the Korean version of the Author's Note, which could be a clue): it's a good idea, given the gist of the central twist(s) of the story about who is who. I'd better not write more on that here ("spoilers").
Bora Chung, writing in the late 2010s, states only that her story is based on the obscure "나선정벌" incident(s) of the 1650s. There is no hint from her, though, at least that I saw, that she consciously puns the the common meaning of "나선" (helix -- also think "double helix") for the way the story evolved. That explanation, however, is satisfying.
I loaned my copy of Red Sword to a friend ahead of this club's upcoming meeting so cannot readily re-check for appearances of "helix" and so forth, right now. I shall return to this thread at a later date...
Wow, thanks for all the info on "The Story of Bae Shi-hwang". Once I had the name I could find it in W. E. Skillend’s Kodae Sosŏl: A Survey of Korean Traditional Style Popular Novels (SOAS, 1966), item #122. Pae Sihwang chŏn. Skillend references Kim Kidong but no other modern scholar, and doesn’t connect the story with Sin Ryu. It looks like anyone who wants to find anything out about the old tales needs to go to Korean resources, which my scant knowledge of Korean doesn’t allow me to do.Re the diffusion of traditional tales and the languages in which they were originally written and transmitted – Literary Chinese vs. Korean language. My sense is that (1) some 17th century tales may have been originally composed in Chinese, but (2) if so they were translated – or maybe better retold – in Korean fairly early on, and that (3) Korean versions were much more likely to be recopied – or re-retold – than Chinese versions, with the result that (4) copies dating from the 19th century were almost certainly to be in Korean, even if the original text was in Chinese. A small number of early texts have survived in Chinese form (if only barely, possibly in a single manuscript) as well as Korean form, but most survive in Korean form only and may have been originally written in Korean.
BTW there is one tale, the early 17th century Tale of Un'yeong (Un’yeong jeon), that was clearly originally composed in Literary Chinese and survived in that form for some time, though Korean versions did later appear. It is – at least in its Chinese form – a sophisticated work including Chinese poetry and Chinese literary allusions, and must have been written for an educated audience (which means practically, members of “elite” = yangban families). I mention it because IMO it’s one of the most interesting and enjoyable works of Joseon period Korean literature, and might be a candidate for the RAS Korean Literature Club if it’s within your time scope. There’s a nice edition by Michael J. Pettid and Kil Cha, with a clean, readable translation (from Chinese) by Cha and a very good, I would say strongly feminist, introduction by Pettid (who goes so far as to propose that the unnamed and so far not conclusively identified author may have been a woman).
Michael J. Pettid and Kil Cha, Unyŏng-jon a Love Affair at the Royal Palace of Chosŏn Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkley, 2009)
Re the possibility that Bora Chung was riffing on hangul homonyms Naseon “Russians” and naseon “spiral, helix”, I received my copy of Red Sword sooner than I thought I would (Honford Star evidently has their own distributor in the US), and could not resist reading it – which I did in two sittings without even pushing myself. I had my eye out for spirals and helixes (helices?) and other whirly things, but all I found were the interjected sections headed Double Helix I-IV. I suppose there could be a connection here (especially if the original version uses what seems to be the standard term 이중 나선ijung naseon for double helix in the context of DNA, but then the sections are about DNA anyway, so if Chung is really riffing on the two naseon’s here, the context of the sections as well as their headings would presumably be part of the riff.
I was intrigued: science-fiction but also a retelling/allegory of a 17th-century China--Korea--Russia clash.
At the end, there is an Author's Note (작가의말). It's a historical or explanatory essay. I offer here my own translation of this Author's Note:
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Author's Note,《RED SWORD》 by Chung Bora (<붉은칼> 정보라, 2019)
Translation-adaptation from Korean to English by Peter J.:
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Between 1654 and 1658, the united forces of Ch'ing-China and Chosun-Korea clashed with Russian forces. The cause was territorial rivalry. Ch'ing-China at this time, in the 1650s, still had much the character of an emerging state. The Ch'ing regime sought ways to shore up its position against the lingering effects of the decline of the Ming regime, which had ruled China before the Ch'ing came to power. They got the idea to enforce distant border claims. Meanwhile, for Russia, while.a range of political considerations existed, it had been economic pressures that had impelled them to advance farther and farther into Siberia, starting in the 1580s already. The Russians' objective was to seek access to animal furs, using new supply to meet the lucrative demand in the Western European market. The two empires, China and Russia, clashed for the first time in the early 1650s. Meanwhile, ever since 1637 -- when the rising Ch'ing regime in China had invaded Chosun-Korea and rapidly defeated resistance -- a patron-client relationship had existed between Ch'ing and Chosun. In other words, Chosun-Korea was a tributary or dependent state of Ch'ing-China. When the impending clash with the Russians came, the Ch'ing government ordered Chosun-Korea to provide support. Chosun dispatched a military expedition-force. Chosun did this not for the benefit of the Ch'ing regime but (also) to secure the integrity of its own (Chosun's) northern territories. The Chosun-Korean military force was victorious in both the clashes of 1654 and 1658. In the battle of 1658, the Russian commander, Onufri Stefanov, was killed. The Ch'ing--Chosun joint force achieved a lasting victory.
A man named Shin Yu was present at the clash of 1658. Shin Yu was a Chosun miliitary officer, and a native of the Korean province of North Hamkyong. Shin Yu left behind a detailed account of the expedition, a kind of diary and commentary. From his account, we know that the Korean side was unaware of the existence of a country called "Russia." The Korean military expeditionary-force, which was dispatched northwards, had left home under the impression that the foes to be confronted up north were bandit gangs. When they encountered the enemy, however, the Koreans saw that these foes were no bandits at all. The foes were, rather, a well-organized army. When the Korean military officer Shin Yu realized the nature of the foe, his reaction was neither one of fear, nor one of haughtily looking down on the enemy as inferior. It was a reaction of respect for the enemy as a worthy opponent. Shin Yu's reaction was that of a professional soldier. The clashes occurred near the Amur River [Manchuria]. In the first battle, the Korean military task-force surprised the Russians and defeated them in one day. In the second battle, however, the Ch'ing side decided they wanted to secure the contents of a large supply-ship that was escorting the Russians. The Ch'ing side therefore ordered the Koreans to hold their cannon fire, so as not to destroy the ship's contents. As a result, combat at closer-quarters was necessitated. In the end, the Korean side lost eight dead and twenty-six wounded. The Korean commander Shin Yu recorded each of the victims' names, one by one, along with their hometowns. When the battle was over, the Ch'ing military-force commander ordered Shin Yu to burn on a pyre the dead bodies of those of his men who had died. Shin Yu, however, refused this request. He instead took pains to ensure the Korean dead were buried with the honors accorded to such battle-deaths under Korean custom.
Shin Yu faced a more-distressing development after the battle in 1658. After the earlier battle, in 1654, the Ch'ing military expedition-force had pursued the Russians. Their aim was to pursue the Russians to their main base in the region and destroy it. That pursuit, of 1654, had been made without Chosun assistance. It was unsuccessful. This time, after the 1658 victory, the Ch'ing side put pressure on the Korean side to pursue the Russians, somewhere farther into Siberia. Shin Yu opposed this proposal. For Shin Yu, the assigned task had been completed: the 1658 battle had been a complete victory for their side. Shin Yu wanted to put his men under no further hardship. He wanted to grant them liberty to return home. After one week of rebuffing and counter-arguing the requests from the Ch'ing side, Shin Yu eventually persuaded the Ch'ing-Chinese side to abandon the pursuit effort. Before leaving the region of the expedition, Shin Yu put a captured Russian rifles in a sack, keeping it as war-booty. He carried the rifle southward, back home. The rifle is a valuable testament to this early Russian--Korean contact. Contact that occurred some two-hundred years before the more-well-known period of contact began between Russia and Korea in the 1860s.
My curiosity was piqued: What ever became of that captured Russian rifle? Another thought: All the elements for a good dramatic hero's story are here. The Koreans -- including the leader of the 1654 force; and also Shin Yu, the leader of the 1658 force -- differed from the Russians whom they encountered in race, in language, in culture, in philosophical worldview, in battle tactics: in everything, really. When the Koreans first encountered the Russians during these expeditions, wouldn't the feeling have been comparable to an encounter with extra-terrestrial aliens?
I liked Shin Yu very much. He mourned the loss of his countrymen and took pains to bury them according to their traditions, despite their presence in foreign territory; he recorded all the names and hometowns of his casualties in his diary, with intense grief; he refused to risk further lives to pursue the vanity of glory-seeking; he instead returned home, with the task completed satisfactorily; he displayed a soldier's professionalism by taking with him, back home, neither expensive furs nor gold-and-silver-type treasures, but rather a Russian rifle. Shin Yu seems to have been an honorable soldier -- and a good person.
And so I came to write this novel dealing with these Russia--Korea encounters of the 1650s. The "empire" in this novel is not modelled on the empire in Star Wars. It is modelled on the empire that spurred the 1650s clashes into being: The Ch'ing Empire, which existed in East Asia between 1618 and the early-20th century. As it happens, transposing these expeditions of the 1650s into outer space presented some immediate problems. As the writing unfolded, a new type of story emerged. In the novel-writing process, such a development cannot be called a problem. And so I continued to write.
From beginning to end, this remained a "war story" and a "story of conflict." But the more I wrote, the more the story shifted towards struggles and strifes with which I am more familiar. No matter what type of struggle or conflict something is, it's always about more than one individual. It's about something far larger. But if you're within that conflict, you only really know the experiences you yourself go through. As I was writing, my mind was often cast back to experiences during the long year of protests following the Sewol Ferry disaster of April 2014 [in which 251 school-children and 54 adults died, 11 of the adults being teachers of the school-children]. I thought back to how I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Sewol parents and my fellow activists. How we formed a human barricade and as our banners flew high. I thought back to how firmly I grasped the hand of a Sewol victim's mother. I thought of the feeling of the masses of regular people rising up. I thought of how we marched, past electric signs and chimneys above us, en route to link up with sit-in demonstrators.
[...] On the other hand, one single person is really small. The solitary individual is tossed into a wide world in which countless problems and struggles exist. I came to realize that it's not possible to easily win these struggles. In the end it was the experience itself, of joint struggle with others, that provided me solace. Others reached out to grasp my hand; I reach out to grasp others' hands.
I wanted to write that kind of story. I wanted to write it in as an appealing a way as possible. There were shooting battles, sword battles; the science-fiction genre gave it a certain heroic quality. The writing ended up being quite fun. I have no regrets.
If you're curious about what happened after the China--Korea--Russia clashes of the 1650s, it's an interesting story: In the early 1700s, the story of these expeditions became a hit fantasy novel. Korea's foreign relations over the prior century and more had been generally bad: there were the wars with Japan of the 1590s; there was the complete defeat to the Ch'ing-Chinese invasion of winter 1636-37, which led to the humiliating treaty of formal subjugation to the Ch'ing regime and dependent-state status; and there had been many smaller humiliations, such as when the earlier Ming regime in China had demanded, and gotten, a Chosun royal prince as a hostage to ensure good behavior. In this context, people readily seized on the clash with Russia of the 1650s, as an example of a victory. There was something especially appealing about the story of the expeditions of the 1650s: the Korean victory, after all, came after the Ch'ing regime's forces had failed to defeat this powerful, capable, unknown foreign enemy. The same Ch'ing regime's forces that had subjugated Chosun-Korea as a dependent state not long earlier! An excellent force of nameless Koreans, drawn from the frontier-defenses, was able to win. The story was appealing to the 18th-century literary men of Chosun-Korea, whose nation remained in dependent-state status vis-a-vis Ch'ing-China. Starting in the early-18th century, the story of the expeditions and clashes with the Russians back in the 1650s were made into novels, and this happened two or three separate times. Shin Yu's record of the expedition, which had been preserved by his descendants, provided a valuable source to provide an outline of the story. Combined with lower-end popular retellings already circulation, the story combined and recombined and emerged as a war-fantasy novel. During that process, many fabrications found their way into the narrative: there are appearances by exotic animals, for example, and out of nowhere there appear beautiful Russian women. In some of these novelizations, a character modelled on Shin Yu leads an unstoppable force of "super-soldiers" who arrive like a burst of wind, then heroically and easily save the day. The Koreans, in this novelized rendering, saved Ch'ing forces facing catastrophic defeat in their struggle against Russians.
The wordly struggles I've known have never been so simple. All sorts of relationships have been posited between the strifes and struggles of troubled times, on one hand, and heroes who emerge in those times, on the other. When you look at things more closely, every age has its struggles and strifes. The heroes that I personally know from struggles are not commanding generals at the head of thousands of soldiers. They are ordinary people who, even when victory is nowhere in sight, grasp firmly the hands of the people next to them. Ordinary people, but brave. I sought to write a story about such as those. My wish is that such people achieve victory in the real world. Sincerely.
January 2019
Bora Chung
(Translation, Peter J.)
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