I’ve been translating a short story at the request of a friend of mine. The friend is Young-Key Kim-Renaud, a retired professor of linguistics at George Washington University. But more importantly, she is the daughter of Han Moo-sook, a famous short story writer. Kim-Renaud is compiling an anthology of her mother’s short stories in English translation. Some of the stories have already been translated, but she wants to translate them all, apparently. She is asking dozens of her friends to each translate one story. The one the we decided I should translate is titled “Yi Sajong’s Wife.” It is a story that looks at a famous piece of folklore from Korean history — I do not know if the story is true or not, but it is presented as a true incident — centered on a famous love story of the most famous gisaeng in Korea, Hwang Jini. The story goes that Hwang Jini fell in love with a man who was a great singer. He was out in the mountains, singing, and she heard him and presented herself to him. She was captured by his beautiful singing, and as it turns out he was a famous singer of t