1996

Pacific Coast of South America

Series Editor Frank Stewart
Guest Editor James Hoggard

Seeing the Invisible
Korean Women's Fiction

Series Editor Frank Stewart
Guest Editor Bruce Fulton

The summer 1996 issue features stunning new work by poets and fiction writers of Chile, Colombia, and Peru—Marjorie Agosin, Pia Barros, Alejandra Basualto, Carlos German Belli, J.G. Cobo Borda, Juan Cameron, Luis Ernesto Carcamo, Jean Pablo del Rio, Oscar Hahn, Jotamario, Marco Martos, Giovanni Quessep, Laura Reisco, and Eduardo Vassallo. Guest-edited by American translator and poet James Hoggard, the feature presents some of the most distinguished and youngest writers of Chile and Colombia. Also included in the feature is an overview essay by Hoggard on the cosmopolitan sensibility and primitive vitality of the region’s literature.

The Pacific South American prose in this issue is equally inventive and energetic. All by women, the stories reflect the tendency among contemporary Latin American women writers to depict a world of instability, a consciousness wounded and troubled. Some of the stories, like some of the poems, explicitly address the physical and psychic violence of living in a totalitarian state.

In addition to the Pacific South American feature, the issue includes a collection of omoro,or desire-songs, handed down through the centuries by the female shamans of Okinawa. The collection was assembled and translated by Japan scholar Chris Drake.
Also in this issue are North American essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, and art. The prose and poetry of American authors include a personal essay on grizzly bears and marriage by Western nature writer Linda Hasselstrom; a sensitive fable about the culture of war by Barry Lopez; and a story by Monica Wood about the bonds of family love. Among the American poets is Arthur Sze.

The photography is by Gaye Chan, a Hawai‘i-based artist whose enigmatic, surrealistic pictures complement wonderfully the haunting fiction in this issue.

About the guest-editor: James Hoggard has published many poems, stories, essays, and translations and teaches at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. His volumes of translations include Oscar Hahn’s The Art of Dying and Love Breaks and Tino Villanueva’s Chronicle of My Worst Years.

Extract

“She came towards us. The men looked at their hands, their boots, anything that could take them away from that place. I couldn’t help but remember my childhood flowing from the rain in that wide greenness that is the South. My father’s long, thin whip didn’t allow for visits to ‘those dirty people and their horrible life’—the attraction of that horrible life represented by the unfathomable Ermina next to her brazier, bearer of the future and of the evil eye.”
—from “Appraisals” by Pia Barros

Seeing the Invisible, MĀNOA’s winter issue, features a collection of new writing from Korea, with a special focus on fiction by women. Since 1987, the year of South Korea's first open presidential elections, Korean literature has experienced a surge of vitality: novelists and short-fiction writers are publishing daring stories that enjoy a large readership at home and deserve an even larger one abroad. Korean women, it should be noted, are at the forefront of this new, popular fiction.

Among the contributors to this feature are O Chong-Hui, Ch'oe Yun, and Kim Hyong Kyong as well as the guest-editor Bruce Fulton, whose essay “Seeing the Invisible: Women's Fiction in South Korea Today” discusses the growing prominence of women's writing in South Korea.

Also in this issue are North American essays, fiction, poetry, and reviews. The authors include fiction writer David Borofka, the late Canadian poet and playwright bpNichol, and essayists Nancy Lord and Suzanne Paola.
The photographs and paintings featured here are by Hawai‘i artist Doug Young whose photorealistic watercolors are saturated with pigment and depict imagery from everyday life in the Hawaiian Islands.

About the guest editor: Bruce Fulton and his wife, Ju-Chan, are the translators of Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers. With Marshall Pihl, Fulton translated Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction. In 1995 Fulton and his wife received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.

Extracts

“The events of that period twenty years ago have returned to my memory like a stage being lit. I see them first as a somber, bluish-green tableau. But then, as if through a window beside the tableau, a warm light emerges. It was a period of confusion. And above all else, suffering. Because it was left unfulfilled? On the other hand, are any of life’s stages ever brought to perfection? There are periods in our past that can’t be dismissed with a flippant ‘Oh, that time.’ They may be short periods, but they work their influence throughout our lives. Nevertheless, daily life is a powerful healer. Day after day snow and rain have fallen, flowers have withered and bloomed, and that period has gradually scabbed over, like a wound grown slowly insensible.”
—from “The Gray Snowman” by Ch’oe Yun

216 pp., summer 1996 (8:1), $20
ISSN 1045-7909
JSTOR

256 pp., winter 1996 (8:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-1906-4
JSTOR