Saturday, February 16, 2013

Enormous Cadaver Shattered by North Korean Knife!

North Korean Flag

I mentioned the other day that I receive the Korea Open Source Digest weekdays. Well, yesterday, Volume VI, Issue 31 (Friday, 15 February 2013) arrived with a wonderfully unbalanced article by a certain Tong T'ae-kwan for North Korea's Rodong Sinmun (2/14/13). Titled "Time Will Prove," it argued that North Korea was right about conducting the recent nuclear test, and the rest of the world wrong in condemning it, because the United States was misleading every other country by pretending to speak for the world through the United Nations. The best line was this one:
We can raise the knife of justice and break into pieces the enormous cadaver that tries to hide its true identity concealed underneath noisy twisted logic and its blood-smeared face borrowing the face of the UN. (page 1-24)
To write a sentence like that one -- in which a dead body uses twisted logic and a UN face mask to hide its true, bloody-faced identity until shattered by a juridical knife -- requires a special literary sort of linguistic genius! The South Koreans can only manage a poor substitute for tortured English, as with the caption from this photograph for the JoongAng Daily, "Better than tractors":

Young students stomp the ground covered
with barley sprouts yesterday in Ulju County, Ulsan,
as fresh spouts have come up with the warmer weather.
It is common practice to pack the ground
as the soil unthaws after winter.

Let that ground 'unthaw' as much as it wants, it'll never match the logic-twisting cadaver!

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