Check Out the Map for Sung-il Kim&#8217;s <i>Blood of the Old Kings</i>

A map is a portrait of possibilities. Its lines and shapes do not represent the mere facts of the world, but allude to all the fantastic and terrible things that may exist there. If here be dragons, here also are our dreams of going to meet them, or driving them to the margins of the painted world.

It follows, then, that a map can also be a diagram of wishes, an expression of hope and will, as it may reframe the present and show the future. In the hands of the powerful, a map rewrites history and dictates the way things have always been. With a line, a country that has been one for a thousand years may be split in two, each given a new name and a new master. With a stroke of the cartographer’s brush, new lands may be created, and old ones subsumed into others. In the real world, imperial ambitions imbued themselves into the maps of the world. But the conquered had their own dreams, and those sometimes made their way onto maps as well, using the technologies and techniques of the conquerors. This map, beautifully drawn by Emily Langmade, is such a map, a statement more than anything else.

In Blood of the Old Kings, a woman born of a conquered people commissioned this map as a gift to her secret king, in the hopes of inspiring him to fight their oppressors. Compared to what is depicted here, the actual world of the book is much larger, and the Three Kingdoms — Kamori, Arland and Ledon — quite smaller. This map, as all maps do, serves an intent. The fact that it omits and resizes many other conquered lands tells us yet another thing about that intent.

I’ve never before seen a map drawn from a book I was translating and I found this unexpectedly moving. For a map is a translation of sorts, and this one by Emily Langmade is brilliantly based on a map that exists within the world of the novel, adding the tension of an extra layer of unreliable narrator. The map makes me think of what my author may feel when seeing my translation, their words rendered into a different landscape. What a strange and wonderful thing a visual artist is, not like a translator and exactly so at the same time.