MY SWEET ORANGE TREE, KOREA, AND THE RELATIONAL IMAGINATION

Abstract

In this essay, I ponder the startling popularity of the José Mauro de Vasconcelos novel My Sweet Orange Tree in Korea, first through a historical and political lens then through a cultural one focused on relationality—understood in the sense of Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Certainly, similarities between Brazil and Korea during their authoritarian years can potentially help explain the work’s initial popularity in Korea, where it remains far and away the most intimately emmeshed work in the country translated from Portuguese. In order to account for its continued prestige in the country over forty years after it was initially translated to Korean, however, I consider it in light of what I posit as a stubborn insistence on relationality and the imagination fundamental to Korean culture in the face of less obvious forms of repression, rigid social stratification, and alienation throughout the country’s long history.