구광렬

Welcome. I am Koo Kwang Yeul — Professor Emeritus, holder of a PhD in Latin American Literature from UNAM in Mexico, and a teacher of some thirty years in the Department of Hispanic and Latin American Studies at the University of Ulsan. I write poetry in both Korean and Spanish, and as a scholar at home in both languages I have translated widely, from literature to scholarly and professional texts.

I was born in Daegu in 1956. After graduating from the Department of Spanish at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, I earned my master's and doctoral degrees in Latin American Literature at the graduate school of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). I made my literary debut in 1986 in the Mexican journals El Punto and La Tinta Seca, and went on to publish collections of Spanish-language poetry in Mexico — earning my name in Latin American literary circles before I did at home.

After lecturing at Seoul National University, I served for some thirty years as a professor in the Department of Hispanic and Latin American Studies at the University of Ulsan, where I am now Professor Emeritus. My publications span poetry, fiction, translation, and scholarship — among them Che's Green Notebook, my translation of the sixty-nine poems Che Guevara copied out by hand into his notebook. Combining the scholarly precision of a native speaker with a poet's feel for his mother tongue, I offer translation that bridges the two languages with exactness.