Trying to Find The Shaman Painting (Munyŏdo) in English

I recently read Kim Dong-ri’s Munyŏdo (무녀도 巫女圖), a short story first published in 1936, and almost immediately started wondering whether there was an English translation I could share.

My first thought was fairly simple. I appreciated the work, and I wanted people who do not read Korean to be able to read it too.

Part of what interested me was the way the story stages a conflict between Korean shamanism and Christianity. Religious conflict of this kind is hardly unusual in modern Korean literature, especially given the history of Christian conversion, colonial modernity, and the transformation of local religious life in the twentieth century. But the particular texture of Munyŏdo felt important to me because it is surprisingly difficult to find comparable texts in English that allow a reader to experience this conflict from within a shamanic world.

A great deal of material about Korean shamanism is available in English, of course. But much of what circulates most readily approaches shamanism from outside it. The reader is often positioned alongside an anthropologist, a Christian, a secular modern subject, or someone who has already been taught to regard shamanic practice as the unusual object requiring explanation.

Munyŏdo begins from a different position. Its world does not need to stop and establish that spirits are real, or explain why a shaman behaves as she does. Mohwa’s relationship to spirits, ritual, illness, divination, and the unseen belongs to the ordinary structure of the story’s world. That does not mean that everyone in the story agrees with her, or that her practices are romanticized. It simply means that shamanism is not introduced first as an exotic problem.

Christianity enters that world later, through Mohwa’s son Ugi. From Mohwa’s perspective, it is Christianity that appears strange. Mohwa literally understands Ugi as being possessed by a “Jesus ghost” that has to be expelled, while Ugi’s use of biblical passages as a language of healing closely resembles the work Mohwa is already performing in the village, only in a different religious idiom. The reversal of perspective changes the emotional and epistemological structure of the conflict.

The story does not solve the problem by simply reversing the hierarchy and presenting shamanism as authentic or pure while Christianity becomes the foreign villain. Mohwa can be frightening - her world is morally complicated, and her certainty becomes violent. The story shows the painful reality of worldviews coming into conflict, and the damages that occur when one of them loses its position as an ordinary way of understanding reality.

That is one reason I wanted an English-language reader to encounter the story itself rather than only read an explanation of Korean shamanism.

Looking for a translation

I initially assumed that finding an English translation would be difficult because Munyŏdo had never appeared among the very limited number of works on Korean shamanism actively circulating in English, despite much demand for more.

However, after a brief search, I found out that the story has actually been translated into English repeatedly. While looking through bibliographies and catalogues, I found versions under several different titles:

• The Tableau of a Shaman Sorceress

• Portrait of a Shaman

• Picture of a Sorceress

• Picture of a Shaman Sorceress

• The Shaman Painting

Translations have been associated with Yong-ch’ŏl Kim, Hong Myoung-hee, Chung Chong-wha, John Holstein, and others. Some appeared in literary anthologies in the 1970s and 1980s; later translations appeared in collections of modern Korean fiction.

This was interesting in itself. The problem was not that nobody had thought Munyŏdo worth translating. Quite the opposite: it appears to have been selected for translation over and over again.

But most of these translations are not especially easy for an ordinary reader to encounter now. Some are buried in older anthologies that are available only through university libraries. Others are attached to commercial academic publishers. And because the English title has changed so many times, a person searching for “Munyŏdo English translation” may not realize that several different versions exist.

This is an accessibility problem of discoverability, cataloguing, and circulation.

A story with several public lives

What makes this problem more interesting is that Munyŏdo itself is hardly an obscure work in Korea. In addition to its canonical status as a short story, the material has had a long and unusually persistent life on screen.

Some of its most prominent adaptations, however, are not actually adaptations of the short story that I had read. They come through Eulhwa (을화), the much longer novel Kim Dong-ri developed from Munyŏdo in 1978.

The 1979 film Eulhwa, directed by Byeon Jang-ho, was a substantial production starring Kim Ji-mee alongside Jeong Ae-ran, Baek Il-seob, Lee Sun-jae, and other major actors. It drew more than 110,000 viewers. A year later, KBS launched TV Literature (티비문학관), its long-running series of television adaptations of Korean literature, with Eulhwa as its very first episode, this time starring Jang Mi-hee, Baek Yoon-sik, Im Dong-jin, Shin Goo, and others. The casts alone would have made both productions difficult to overlook: these were among the most recognizable actors in Korea, bringing considerable public visibility and anticipation to each adaptation.

The story has continued to be restaged. More recently, Ahn Jae-hoon adapted Munyŏdo as the animated musical The Shaman Sorceress, which returned to Mohwa, Ugi, and Nangi rather than following the expanded life story of Eulhwa. The film received a jury distinction at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, although its critical reception also captures something of the odd position these adaptations occupy: it was praised for its visual beauty while also criticized for falling back on familiar ways of dramatizing the disappearance of an older Korean world with emotional music.

I found this repeated return to the story almost as interesting as the story itself. These are not marginal adaptations made once and forgotten. They involve major actors, national television, feature filmmaking, and, most recently, an ambitious animated musical. Yet they have not consolidated into one obvious or definitive screen version of Munyŏdo. Instead, the material keeps branching. Sometimes the object being adapted is Munyŏdo; sometimes it is Eulhwa; and each version rearranges the characters, chronology, and emphasis again.

By the time I returned to the question that had started all of this—where to find Munyŏdo in English—the instability was no longer only a matter of translation titles. There was already a complicated history of the work being revised, expanded, renamed, and adapted.

The Digital Library of Korean Literature has a record specifically for Munyŏdo. The page identifies it as a short story, names Mohwa, Ugi, and Nangi as its main characters, and explicitly explains that Kim Dong-ri later expanded it into the 1978 novel Eulhwa. So the database itself recognizes that these are related but distinct works.

Under “Translated Books,” however, the same page links to the 1989 English book The Shaman Sorceress, translated by Hyun Song Shin and Eugene Chung, and presents it as an English translation of Munyŏdo. But the book is actually a translation of the later novel Eulhwa.

If the distinction between Munyŏdo and Eulhwa can be collapsed even within an archive specifically designed to document and organize these works, it points to a larger problem in how literary texts travel across languages and cultural contexts. Related works are easily grouped together, publication histories are simplified, and distinctions that may seem minor from a distance can disappear altogether. The result is not necessarily deliberate distortion, but a structural tendency toward flattening that makes already complicated textual histories even harder to recover.

The confusion also says something about Munyŏdo itself. Kim Dong-ri did not write the story in 1936 and leave it untouched. He revised it substantially in later editions before eventually expanding the material into Eulhwa. The characters, narrative details, and implications of the conflict between shamanism and Christianity changed across that process. The boundary between the works therefore has a real history rather than being completely fixed.

What began as a straightforward search for an English translation was therefore turning into a much messier question about what exactly was being translated in the first place.

There is not one stable object moving neatly from Korean into English. There is an original short story, several revised forms of that story, a later novel-length expansion, major film and television adaptations based largely on that expansion, a more recent animation returning to the short story, and multiple English translations published under different titles and not always clear about their Korean source edition.

The problem of accessibility, then, is not only that Munyŏdo is difficult to find. It is also difficult to know which Munyŏdo one has found.

What gets lost in making the story legible

Of all the versions I encountered, the short story remains by far the most powerful to me. At the same time, the long history of revision and adaptation suggests that I am not alone in sensing something unusually compelling in it. Kim Dong-ri himself repeatedly returned to the material, revising the story before eventually expanding it into Eulhwa. Filmmakers and television producers have continued to restage it across very different periods and media.

What interests me is that the later versions seem to gain narrative explanation while losing some of what made the short story so striking in the first place.

The short form gives Munyŏdo a particular compression. Its symbolism is dense, its conflicts are not fully resolved through explanation, and much of its force comes through scenes, textures, and confrontations that are almost theatrical. To me, this is precisely where the story captures something important about shamanism. Its world is not organized through explanatory narrative. Meaning accumulates through images, actions, relationships, ritual, and the force with which incompatible realities occupy the same space.

Later versions do something different. Eulhwa, for example, gives the shaman a longer biography, additional characters, and a more developed social and psychological context. These additions can make the story more intelligible as narrative, but they also redistribute the strange concentration of the short story into causes, motivations, histories, and explanations. All adaptations have produced mixed responses rather than establishing a single version as the outstanding realization of the work.

Established critique of the original story identifies what might conventionally look like formal weaknesses: its intensity can seem excessive, its realism unstable, and its narrative construction insufficiently developed. I find myself reading those supposed weaknesses differently - if the story were simply underdeveloped, it is difficult to explain why the material has generated so many attempts to develop it further, given the abundance of other works dealing with Korean shamanism. I wonder instead whether some of what appears insufficient according to modern expectations of narrative coherence is also where the story holds something that becomes difficult to retain once it is reorganized into those terms.

This question became unexpectedly familiar to me because it resembles a problem I repeatedly encounter when speaking about shamanic knowledge in academic settings.

The initial response to my work is often strong. People respond to the material itself, to the questions it opens, and to a kind of energy that can make the work easy to invite into conversations in the first place. The difficulty arises at the next stage, when that material is expected to become more fully legible within established academic forms. The request is almost always some version of translation: explain the knowledge more clearly, strengthen the narrative, make the causal or argumentative sequence more explicit, tell the reader exactly how one thing leads to another.

The problem is that complying with them can alter precisely what generated the initial response. Once material that does not primarily organize itself through linear explanation is rewritten until it does, something central disappears. Then a peculiar cycle begins: the revised version is more recognizable according to the expected form, but it no longer carries the same force. Because that loss is difficult to name, it appears as another problem requiring another revision: the framing needs adjustment, the argument needs sharpening, the structure needs changing again. The work can become increasingly legible while also moving further away from what made it worth translating in the first place.

Seeing the history of Munyŏdo made that dilemma much more concrete to me. The story seems to have invited the same impulse repeatedly: there is clearly something here, and perhaps it can be made fuller, clearer, more narratively complete. Yet the extraordinary force of the short story may lie in the fact that it does not fully submit to those demands.

One translation that is actually accessible

While going through the different English versions, I found one full translation that can currently be read online without locating an old anthology or using a university library.

Daniel O. Pieper translated the story as The Shaman Painting (Munyŏdo) for a Korean Literature Translation Workshop in 2010. He later uploaded the full translation to ResearchGate, where it remains publicly accessible: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346576512_Literary_Translation_The_Shaman_Painting_Munyodo

In Korean American shamanic communities, and within a broader Asian American interest in spirituality, I have repeatedly noticed how much curiosity and demand there is for knowledge about Korean shamanism. The amount of material that actually circulates in English, however, remains remarkably small. Primary materials are especially difficult to access. There is interpretive scholarship available, although not nearly enough of that either, but it is often easier to find someone explaining Korean shamanism in English than to find the texts, stories, rituals, performances, and other materials through which readers might encounter its worlds more directly.

The disproportion becomes especially striking from Korea. Korean shamanism has accumulated an enormous body of material across thousands of years: oral narratives, ritual texts, songs, regional traditions, ethnographic records, literature, theatre, film, television, and countless local forms that a person could spend a lifetime studying without exhausting. Yet only a tiny fraction of that archive travels into English. What does travel often does so through the kinds of processes I encountered while looking for Munyŏdo: old translations become inaccessible, titles change, editions are unclear, related works are collapsed into one another, and materials are reorganized into forms that make them easier to explain across cultural contexts while sometimes losing important distinctions along the way.

There is also a more personal reason why this imbalance frustrates me. When I speak about Korean shamanism in American academic contexts, I am most always asked to provide more explanation, more evidence, or a clearer narrative before the knowledge I am describing can be granted much weight. The assumption easily becomes that if I cannot immediately translate something into a recognizable explanatory structure, its depth or legitimacy remains uncertain.

But my difficulty is often almost the opposite. There is too much behind what I am trying to say, accumulated across forms of knowledge that do not necessarily organize themselves according to the narratives through which my audience expects expertise to become visible. Faced with a question that seems to require a short, linear justification, I find myself unsure where to begin—not because there is little to substantiate what I am saying, but because there is way too much, making selection for that substatiation almost impossible without one substantiation requiring another, and on and on.

Limited familiarity on the receiving end converts into a demand that the knowledge itself prove its existence in terms already familiar to that audience. When it does not immediately register within those terms, the hesitation of the person trying to translate it can be mistaken for uncertainty, insufficient grounding, or a lack of intellectual clarity. But sometimes the hesitation comes from the opposite direction: the available framework is simply too narrow for what is trying to pass through it.

Sometimes what appears to be missing is backed by an archive that has barely entered the conversation at all. And a small number of available works can end up doing the work of representing an enormously larger field, not necessarily because they are the most representative or even the most compelling materials, but because they happen to be the ones that crossed the linguistic and institutional threshold successfully.

That is ultimately why I wanted to document Munyŏdo as a particularly useful case. I began with a short story that seemed, to me, unusually effective at conveying something about a shamanic worldview that is difficult to reproduce through explanation alone. I then discovered that it had already crossed languages and media many times, yet remained surprisingly difficult to locate in English in a clear and accessible form. Its history shows both how much work has already gone into making Korean shamanism travel and how much can still be narrowed, flattened, or simply lost in that process.

So this post is partly an attempt to make one small piece of that archive easier to find. There is far more to read than what currently circulates in English, and Munyŏdo is only one example.