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Korean author debuts in English with popular novel

Aug. 7, 2011 - 13:53 By

NEW YORK (AP) --There's a big difference between ``mother'' and ``mom.''

``Mother'' is someone to be respected, perhaps held at arm's length. But ``mom'' is an intimate name. It's the woman on the floor playing with her child, wisps of hair falling around her face, instead of the woman in the starched dress sitting in the parlor.

(Yonhap News)


The distinction made all the difference for novelist Kyung-Sook Shin, whose book ``Please Look After Mom'' has made a splash in the United States and is a best-seller in her native South Korea.

On a recent day in New York, Shin discussed, through her translator, the popularity of the novel and its universal themes of mother and child, and the gradual realization that all our moms actually have a life outside the family and are women with thoughts and desires.

The book centers on a modern-day family coping with grief when their mother, known only as Mom, vanishes in a busy city train station. The story tracks the woman's disappearance through the eyes of her children, her husband and, ultimately, through her own words.

The first line reads: ``It's been one week since Mom went missing.''

As a teenager, Shin had taken the night train to Seoul with her mother and thought to herself that when she became a writer she would write an ode to her mom. Shin contemplated the book for years, thinking of the character as ``Mother,'' but was unable to set anything on the page.

Then one day, the first line suddenly came to her, and the use of ``mom'' changed everything.

``It surprised me,'' she said. ``Everything flowed very naturally ... as though a door had opened.''

Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed authors. She was honored with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France's Prix de l'Inapercu. She had dreamed for years of becoming a writer and published her first work of fiction in a Korean literary journal at 22.

Shin grew up on a farm with many brothers and sisters. She was an avid reader, even though there weren't many books available.

``As my older brothers would borrow books and bring them into our house, I would read the books and find out about a world I didn't know,'' she said. ``I would just take them away to into my space, and they would come look for me or the books.''

She papered the windows of her room so that she could focus, reading entire anthologies, history books, whatever she could get her hands on.

``My mother was very happy to see me read,'' she said.

Most of the younger children out in the country were expected to help with farm work, she said, not become writers. And so, Shin went to Seoul to study, with her family's blessings. From the time she was 16 to age 30, she worked all sorts of jobs so she could write _ editing at a publishing house, writing for a radio station, tutoring children.

``There was a kind of literary atmosphere that I was able to inhabit and I was able to kind of understand what it meant to be working with literature,'' she said.

When she was about to turn 30, she published a collection of short stories that sold 300,000 copies, the first time a collection had done so well in Korea, she said, and everything changed. Since then, she writes full time, working on coming-of-age stories, historical novels and nonfiction. She has published seven novels, two nonfiction books and several collections of short stories.

``Please Look After Mom,'' her first book to appear in English, debuted as No. 4 on the New York Times list of best-sellers and is now in its eighth printing. It will be published in 19 countries.

The book is richly imaginative, but also grounded in reality as the daughter, oldest son and husband take the reader through their guilt, fears and realizations about the mom and the sacrifices she made for them. Through them, a portrait is created of a woman whose identity is shaped almost entirely by her children, her secret thoughts and desires locked away.

As she wrote her book, the person Shin called most was her mom.

``I used to think, as many people do, that my mother was born a mother. But through the process of writing I came to understand that she was born something else entirely and became a mother,'' she said.

Shin's English author, Robin Desser, said she was hooked from the first sentence. She worked with a translator to preserve Shin's voice and to tweak so readers would really grasp the story.

``You hope for the perfect balance between being true to the authenticity of the work, and having a translation that reads fluently,'' she said.

Desser said the differing points of view, and the universal theme of motherhood, made the book a natural for translation. It also has the bonus of showing English readers sociological changes occurring in Korea.

``She uses specific imagery so powerfully and with great emotion, so you feel you are there,'' she said. ``You are at once related to something, being delivered to your door and heart with so much grace.''

And while reading it, readers can't help but think about their own moms and feel pangs of sadness, melancholy or nostalgia.

But Shin, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University, doesn't want us to feel guilt over the selfless acts of her story's mother and the self-absorbed children.

``I don't think that's a productive way of looking at mother-child relations,'' she said. ``I'd like to think of it as a natural cycle that you get a mother's love and then you give that love to someone else. Through that progression, we can make good on that relationship.''

(한글요약) 
신경숙이 보여준 '엄마'와 '어머니'의 차이

AP통신, 작가와 '엄마를 부탁해' 소개

"어머니(mother)와 엄마(mom)라는 말에는 큰 차 이가 있다. 존경 받는 사람인 '어머니'는 어느 정도 거리감이 있지만 '엄마'는 아주 친밀한 이름이다. 점잖은 옷을 입고 응접실에 앉아있는 여성이 아니라 방바닥에서 머리카락을 얼굴에 늘어뜨린 채 아이와 놀아주는 여성이다."

AP통신은 미국에서 장편 '엄마를 부탁해' 영문판을 출간해 호응을 얻은 작가 신 경숙(48)씨가 이런 차이를 보여줬다고 5일 소개했다.

AP는 이 책에 대해 그저 '엄마'로만 알려진 한 어머니가 번화한 도시의 지하철 역에서 사라진 뒤 슬픔에 대처하는 현대 가족의 모습에 중점을 두면서 이 여성의 부 재를 자식과 남편, 궁극적으로는 그녀 자신의 언어로 좇아간다고 설명했다.

신씨는 최근 뉴욕에서 어머니와 자식이라는 보편적 주제에 대해 논하면서 우리 의 엄마들도 가정 이외의 곳에서 삶이라는 게 있으며 생각과 욕구를 가진  여성이라 는 점을 점차 깨달았다고 말했다.

통신은 "엄마를 잃어버린 지 일주일 째다"라는 첫 문장으로 시작되는 이 소설이 어떻게 구상됐는가를 전했다.

10대 시절 엄마와 함께 밤기차를 타고 서울로 향했던 신씨는 작가가 되면 엄마 에게 바치는 글을 쓰겠다고 생각했다.

오랜 시간 이를 고민하던 중 첫 문장이 그녀에게 떠올랐고 '엄마'라는 단어를 쓰면서 모든 것이 달라졌다.

이때문에 자신도 깜짝 놀랐다는 신씨는 "모든 것이 정말이지 문이 열리는 것처럼 자연스럽게 진행됐다"고 당시를 회고했다.

통신은 신씨가 한국에서 만해 문학상과 동인 문학상, 이상문학상 등과 프랑스의 '주목받지 못한 작품상'을 수상한 한국의 인기작가라면서, 22세에 등단하기까지 작가의 이야기를 전했다. 

전북 정읍 출신인 신씨는 유년 시절, 주변에 읽을 만한 책이 얼마 되지  않았는 데도 책을 갈망했고 손에 잡히는 것은 뭐든지 읽어내는 모습에 "엄마가 매우 행복해 했다"고 말했다.

오빠가 빌려온 책을 읽고 자신만의 세상으로 빠져든 이야기며 이후 상경해 출판 사 등지에서 글과 관련된 여러 일을 하다 인기작가가 된 이야기는 국내에선 잘 알려 져있다.

통신은 이 책이 현실에 기초를 둔 풍부한 상상력으로 엄마와, 엄마가 가족을 위 해 바쳤던 희생에 대해 말한다고 평가했다.

신씨는 "다른 많은 사람처럼 나도 내 엄마는 처음부터 엄마로 태어났다고  생각 했지만, 쓰는 과정을 통해 다른 어떤 존재로 태어나서 나중에 어머니가 됐다는 것을 이해할 수 있었다"고 회상했다.

신씨가 책을 쓰면서 불러낸 사람은 바로 작가의 엄마였다는 것이다.

'엄마를 부탁해'의 편집을 담당한 크노프사의 부사장 겸 수석 에디터인 로빈 데서는 이 책의 첫 문장에 매혹됐다고 말했다.

데서는 작가의 목소리를 그대로 전달해 독자들이 그 이야기에 집중하도록 애썼다면서 모성애라는 보편적 주제가 번역을 자연스럽게 만들었으며 더불어 한국에서 일어나는 사회적 변화도 보여줬다고 강조했다.

데서는 "작가가 특별한 묘사와 정서를 잘 활용한 덕분에 독자들로 하여금 그곳 에 있다고 생각하며 충만함을 느끼게 한다"고 말했다.

독자들은 저마다 엄마를 생각하면서 격한 슬픔과 향수를 느낀다는 것이다.

그러나 신씨는 독자들이 죄의식을 느끼는 것을 원치 않는다면서 "어머니와 자식 관계는 자연적 순환으로 보고 싶다"며" "당신이 어머니의 사랑을 받으면 당신은  누 군가에게 그 사랑을 준다"라고 말했다.

뉴욕타임스의 베스트셀러 4위에 올랐던 '엄마를 부탁해'는 이제 8쇄에 들어가며 총 19개국에서 출간될 예정이다. (연합뉴스)