International Communication Foundation and Korea Institute Establish $1.5 Million Korean Literature Endowment

Professor Carter Eckert and Dr. Sunshik Min

The Korea Institute has reached an agreement with the International Communication Foundation (ICF) of Seoul to establish an endowment fund to support the translation and publication of Korean literary works, and studies on Korean literature. The fund, in the amount of $1.5 million, will be named in honor of Dr. Sunshik Min, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, member of the Asia Center Advisory Board, and President of the Sisayongosa Publishing Company in Korea. Income from the endowment will be used to support the translation and publication of translated and original works of Korean literature and on Korean literary themes.

Carter J. Eckert, Director of the Korea Institute, called the establishment of the endowment a "major milestone in the promotion of Korean literature in the English-speaking world." "This joint effort by the ICF and the Korea Institute," Eckert continued, "is a signal that the translation and study of Korean literature outside Korea is entering a new and exciting professional stage and that Harvard is leading the way. We are deeply grateful to the ICF for this magnificent gift."

David McCann, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature, observed on the occasion of the Fund's establishment that it will enable Harvard to make substantial changes in the Korean literature field, most directly by supporting translations and publications, but also by enhancing the general awareness of Korean literature through other related activities. "The Min Endowment gives great visibility to the literature program at Harvard," Professor McCann noted. "It is a real challenge to all of us to do our best to promote the appreciation of literary works from Korea." He added that the Sisayongosa Company has been in the forefront in Korea in publishing and other programs related to the English language, including English language education, historically. The company recently became publisher of the Korean edition of the National Geographic magazine. "I am hoping to make use of their unique expertise in the field as we move ahead with the new program at Harvard."

	Dr. Suk kee Yoh , Chairman of the International Communications Foundation, and Professor David McCann

One of the recent accomplishments through the Korean literature program at Harvard has been the Harvard Review's acceptance for publication of a short story, "The Blind Calf," by the Korean woman writer Shin Kyongsuk. "This is a real first, the publication of a story from Korea by a literary journal in the United States," according to McCann. The translation by Youngnan Yu was supported by the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation as part of a project that McCann and YoungJun Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in Korean literature and former senior editor at Minumsa Publishers in Seoul, put together to promote the circulation of Korean literary works in the realm where, as McCann observes, "literature really lives today." He went on to note that graduate students in the Modern Korean Poetry seminar at Harvard are required to select and translate modern poetry, and then go through the experience of identifying suitable literary journals, and submitting the poems for consideration. "Only one hit, so far," according to McCann, "but more than worth the effort. When the poet J. D. McClatchy was out looking for materials for The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, he went to the Quarterly Review of Literature, where he found a group of poems that I had translated by the poet Sŏ Chŏngju. That's what I mean by ‘the realm where literature lives’. That will happen again, if we can get the poems out there."

During the past several years the Korean literature program at Harvard has been developing rapidly under Professor McCann's guidance. One of McCann's students, Jiwon Shin, now a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, has accepted a tenure-track appointment in Korean literature at the University of California at Berkeley and will begin teaching there in the fall of 2003. Other Harvard students have also been actively pursuing their degrees in Korean literature. YoungJun Lee and Scott Swaner, the latter just having completed a year in Seoul as a Fulbright Grantee, received a grant from the Korean Literature Translation Institute to do a selection of poems by Hwang JiWoo. John Frankl presented a paper at a recent conference in Korea and is finishing his dissertation on Korean narrative. Professors Youngmin Kim and Kyongjin Hur, of Yonsei University, and Professor Jangwu Lee, of Yeongnam University in Daegu, have also been at Harvard recently as Visiting Scholars, and have contributed their expertise in modern literature, Korean hanshi, or poetry written in Chinese, and Chinese literature in Korea to the lively academic community in Cambridge.