Short stories
The Wings
날개
Yi Sang · 1936
Synopsis
The narrator, an intellectual, lives with his wife in a brothel, in two rooms separated by a partition: his own, dark, at the back, and the one where she receives. He hardly goes out, lives on what she gives him and spends his days in small solitary games. Seeing that the visitors leave money with his wife, he wants to know that gesture too; he goes out, wanders the streets without spending anything and comes back to give her his coins. She then has him take, for a cold, tablets that she says are aspirin.
Context
The story appeared in September 1936 in the magazine Jogwang, shortly before its author left for Japan. It opens with a framed epigraph asking the reader whether he has ever seen a stuffed genius. The narrative sets three spaces against one another: the narrator's room, his wife's room and the world outside; the Korean entry of the Literature Translation Institute reads in it self-doubt, the desire to flee and the pathology of the colonial city, and its English version stresses the interior monologue that expresses the alienation of modern man.
Who it is for
A short story, told as an interior monologue by a narrator who describes himself as a stranger to his surroundings.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English as early as 1983, into French in 2002 and again in 2004, and since then into German and Arabic.
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