Book Review
Cursed Bunny (2022)
by Bora Chung
Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
Cursed Bunny was a 2022 Booker International Nominee. It was translated from the Korean by Anton Hur- who also translated Counterweight by Djuna. Chung graduated from Yale and a PhD in Slavic Literature at Indiana University and she teaches Russian in Korea as her day job, which means she is fluent at a professional/artistic/specialist level in at least three different languages. You would think she could have either composed Cursed Bunny in English or provided her own translation but Korean appears to be a complicated language to translate because they have their brand of experientialism that has to do with the placement of the written figures of Korean on the page.
I'm not sure if that was in play here, but I often feel with Korean literature that something is lost in the translation or at least that a deeper knowledge of Korean culture is required to really appreciate the fiction. Cursed Bunny is a collection of ten short stories that combine the supernatural, body horror and 'magical realism' in different shapes and sizes.
To give an example drawn from the title story, a family is in the business of making fetish curses. They create one for the head of a corporation who has wronged a victim who hires the family to make him a curse. Instead of taking the cursed fetish (a rabbit lamp) home, he puts it into storage. Chaos ensues. It's not the only story about a curse, and roughly half have some kind of supernatural element. Like many Korean books that get translated, I found myself wondering about the motivations of the characters in a way that rarely happens when I read books from the west.
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