Originally published in the Asia Pacific Memo on February 21st, 2016.
Yoon Taeho’s Moss has the good fortune to be translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, an award-winning team widely acclaimed for their many translations of modern and contemporary Korean literature. The APM’s editor Hyung-Gu Lynn sat down virtually with Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton to ask some questions about the process of translating Moss – currently serialized in English on Huffington Post.
HYUNG-GU LYNN (HGL): HOW DID YOU BECOME INVOLVED IN TRANSLATING WEBTOONS, OR MORE SPECIFICALLY, MOSS?
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (BJCF): In our translation work we’re always on the lookout for ways to engage a broader audience with Korean literature, and Bruce’s teaching at UBC explores potential intertextual and intermedial links with Korean popular culture (Hallyu). For example, he uses Park Jiyoon’s S?nginshik (Coming-of-age ceremony) music video in his modern Korean literature survey course.
In the fall of 2009 Bruce met Yoon Taeho at UBC and he gave us a copy of Moss. We liked the plot and were fascinated by the images, especially Yoon’s drawing of eye movements. We saw in the story an allegory of abuse of power during the period of military dictatorship in the ROK, and Bruce thought it might prove useful in his teaching. So we obtained permission to translate one episode for trial use in class, and afterward Bruce canvassed his students and obtained an overwhelmingly positive response. So back we went to Yoon and his company and obtained permission to translate the entire five volumes for educational use.
Further, Yoon had virtually nothing in English translation, despite his considerable output over the previous two decades. That he remained virtually unknown in the English-speaking world reinforced in our minds the desirability of introducing him through a high-quality translation of one of his most important works.
And then last year, a further stroke of good luck. A Korean company, Rolling Story, packaged that work and some two dozen others and proposed them to the Huffington Post. Huffington Post accepted half a dozen works for serialization, including our translation of Moss. At the moment, about half of Moss has appeared, with a new installment published every Monday.
Read the full interview on the Asia Pacific Memo’s website >>
