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I
arrived in Korea in May 1980, invited by Cardinal Kim
Soo-hwan as a Brother of
Taizé, with other brothers. I began to learn Korean at
Yonsei University and in
1985 unexpectedly became a professor of English
literature at Sogang
University. Late in 1988, I was talking with a
colleague, professor Kim Tae-ok,
and said that since I was teaching Korean students
about English poetry, I
would like to get to know some modern Korean poetry.
She at once spoke of Ku
Sang, with whom she had been staying at the East-West
Center in the University
of Hawai’i some years earlier. There she had tried to
translate a few of his
poems, which she could show me. There was also a
French translation of his
work. She felt that with his Catholic faith and his
interest in Eastern
religions, I would find him interesting, while his
style was extremely simple
and human, not too hard to translate. Professor
Kim
also gave me a copy of his 그리스도
풀의 강 and 밭 일기 and
I went on to translate them. I loved their evocations
of the river and of
nature and that became my second volume, “A Korean
Century” with 100 poems from
those two collections. From time to time I used to go
with Professor Kim to
meet Ku Sang for lunch, sometimes Professor Pi
Cheon-deuk who, although he was
older, was Ku Sang’s godson, would join us. I was
amazed by the way Ku Sang was
always so happy, smiling especially when he saw
children. In
1989, Samseong Publishing had published an illustrated
collection, Yuchi
Challan 유치 찬란,
poems by Ku Sang, paintings by JungGwang, a beautiful
book that I at once set
about translating. Luckily, the publisher, Kim
Jong-gyu, still had 1,000 pages
printed with the paintings without the Korean texts.
Seeing my translations, he
decided to publish an English edition, “Infant
Splendor.” The poems were short
and snappy “Zen poems” in style. I especially loved a
poem where a child he met
said she had told her class that she knew him, and
when asked what he looked
like, replied: “That you're just an ordinary old man,
but that you look like a
little boy playing by himself!” Some of these poems I
think are Ku Sang’s
finest, so light and joyful.
The years passed, Ku Sang grew
older, his wife died. It was already past 2000 when
one day he mentioned how
much he longed for me to translate the 100 poems he
had written as a poetic
autobiography, poems about every major event in his
life. I felt that I had to
do that for him, he was already fragile. When I had
finished, a friend in Seoul
who had published several of my translations, Jang
So-nim of Dapge Publishing
agreed to publish the poems. The book was published,
we had the first copies,
ready to show to the poet. But it was early May 2004,
he was in intensive care,
tubed, unable to speak. I could only show him the
book, press it into his hand.
It was my last glimpse of Ku Sang, smiling as ever. He
died on May 11.
It was a grace for me to have known
Ku Sang and to have translated most of his poems. I
only wish I had met him
more often, heard more of his thoughts about faith and
life. But his poems
teach us so much. Perhaps the key to his vision is
found in one line of the
poem “시심” “There is nothing in
the world, to be sure, that is not a poem.
Discovering
that, and then like a child savoring and enjoying
it, is to be a poet.”
In
1946, Ku Sang took leave of his widowed mother, who
was living near Wonsan, on the east coast of what is
now North Korea. As she watched from the road in front
of the gateway, he walked away, heading for the
southern part of the Korean peninsula. Neither could
imagine that they would never meet again. After
returning from studies of comparative religion in
Tokyo a few years earlier, he had found work as a
journalist and had already written a number of poems.
With other local poets, he had recently been working
on a collective volume of their poems, to be entitled
Eunghyang ‘Congealed fragrance.’ Before any
book could be published, it had to be approved by the
authorities, already dominated by the Communist party,
and in this case the censors had detected seven
separate serious ideological failings. To avoid a
trial and a potentially lethal outcome, Ku Sang fled,
leaving behind not only his mother and his elder
brother, a Catholic priest, but also his recently
married wife. His wife was later able to join him in
the South, but the other members of his family
remained in the North until their deaths. Once
he safely reached South Korea in 1946, he soon found
work writing for
newspapers, then served in a military intelligence
unit during the Korean War
(1950-3). After that, he returned to journalism and
wrote articles and opinion
columns, then editorial columns, for various
newspapers. Soon after the Korean
War ended, in 1953, when the president Syngman Rhee
was clearly abusing his
powers, Ku Sang wrote a series of articles ‘Democratic
Accusations,’ attacking
the corruption of his regime. He was immediately
imprisoned on trumped-up
charges for several months. He lived for many years in
Waegwan, not far from
Daegu, where his wife ran a children’s hospital while
Ku Sang worked as a
journalist especially connected with the Gyeonghyang
Shinmun, then run
by the Catholic church. After the 1961 coup by Park
Chung-hee, whom Ku Sang had
come to know several years before, he was pressured to
accept a ministerial
position and finally, to avoid this, he arranged to
spend several years in
charge of the newspaper’s Tokyo bureau. Later he
lectured on literature in a
number of universities, including Chungang University
in Anseong, and made two
lengthy visits as a visiting professor to the
East-West Center at the
University of Hawaii.
In
the course of his life, Ku Sang published a number of
volumes of poetry, as
well as essays on social, literary, and spiritual
topics; he also wrote plays
and scenarios, and edited some popular anthologies.
His first volume, ‘Ku Sang,’
was published in 1951. A volume of the poems he wrote
on the sufferings of the
Korean people during the war and its aftermath, Chotoeui
shi ‘Wastelands
of Fire,’ was published in 1956 and attracted
considerable attention. He then
turned toward nature and began the first of his great
cycles, Bat ilgi ‘Diary
of the Fields’ which was first published in 1967. This
was later joined by a
second cycle, Christophereui gang
‘Christopher’s River,’ inspired by his
daily walks along the banks of the Han River in Seoul
and both express the
spiritual, social and ecological values he discovered
in Nature. Later,
he published essays on specifically Catholic themes in
such volumes as ‘Jesus of
Nazareth’ (1979) and religious poems in Malsseumeui
shilsang ‘The True
Appearance of the Word’ (1980). In 1981, his work took
on a more overtly
satiric tone with his denunciations of the materialism
and emptiness of modern
life in the poems of Ggamagui ‘The Crow.’ The
volume Mogwa ongduriedo
sayeoni itta ‘Even the knots on quince trees
tell tales’ first
published in 1984 and subsequently extended contains
100 poems evoking his
life's often uncertain and sometimes amusingly
stumbling progress through the agonies
of modern Korean history. He always refused to take
himself seriously, and many
of his poems reflect his conviction that, as Saint
Paul wrote: ‘Where sin
abounds, grace abounds the more.’ (Rom. 5:20) He
therefore liked to admit his
own human weaknesses in order to stress his trust in
God’s mercy. At the same
time, he was often heard to stress that ‘without
metaphysics there can be no
poetry.’ By metaphysics, he meant an understanding of
life and the world
informed by a religious dimension and at least in his
own case that meant by
faith in a redeeming, merciful God. His
poetry was from early on marked by a rejection of the
refined symbolism and
artificial rhetoric that characterized the often more
highly esteemed work of senior
Korean poets. Instead, Ku Sang often begins his poems
with the spontaneous,
artless evocation of a sudden moment of perception, in
the midst of the city or
of nature, and moves from there to more general
considerations, frequently
turning into a meditation on the presence of Eternity
in the midst of very
ordinary experiences. Many poems are hymns celebrating
the wonder of being
alive. His finest work has a Zen-style lightness and
freedom and the volume Yuchichallan
‘Infant Splendor’ of 1991 combined delightfully
spontaneous poems by Ku Sang
with paintings by the Buddhist ‘Mad Monk’ Junggwang.
One of the main
translators of his work once wrote: ‘No other Korean
poet has so perfectly
brought together the Christian belief that all is
redeemed in God’s eternity
with the Buddhist conviction that all that exists is
united in an unending
cosmic process.’ The Korean PEN Center several times
proposed him for the Nobel
Prize in Literature. He
was remarkable for his laughing responses to life,
even in its most serious
moments. He notoriously laughed while he was speaking
at his wife’s funeral
Mass, and several of his friends remarked that it was
only suitable that the
photograph carried before his coffin at his funeral
showed him smiling rather
mischievously. In Ku Sang, Korea produced a major poet
of great originality and
utter personal integrity. The major French poet and
critic René Tavernier once wrote
of his work: ‘A poetry born out of faith in God, and
at the same time emerging
from history, the thoughts of Ku Sang are based on
experience as well as on
belief: physical reality, appearances are by no means
insignificant but beyond
them there is another truth of which we only detect
traces here and there. The
thinker, the theologian, the believer are able to
sense the existence of that
higher universe. For Ku Sang, poetry is the sign of an
inner experience.’ He wrote in the preface
to Yuchichallan ‘Infant Splendor’: ‘The mind
of childlike innocence that
we try to portray in our poems and paintings is not
that state naturally found
in the child before it reaches the age of
discretion, but rather the condition
of someone who has reached purity of heart by
achieving mastery over self. Not,
of course, that we claim to have attained such a
state; I would rather say that
we have simply been striving to fathom what might be
the nature of such a
state. At a time when the whole world seems
fascinated by strategic values such
as ownership and profit, in the midst of all this
uproar, the fact is that we
are eager to achieve such an innocence in our lives.
While we were bringing out
our series of poems and paintings, we were
criticized on the one hand for being
‘unrealistic,’ on the other for being ‘unartistic’.
But since neither of us has
ever had any thought of becoming the ‘ornament of
the age’ as poet or artist,
it seems not to matter!’ That
recalls one of the poems from that volume, in which
he tells how
delighted he was to hear a neighborhood child say she
had told her school
teacher that she knew a famous poet ‘who looks just
like a little boy playing
by himself.’ Authenticity in him meant lightness and
truth; he was never
ashamed to evoke moments of sexual or other
transgression, to the great
surprise of many Catholic priests who wanted Korea’s
leading Catholic poet to
present a mask of feigned respectability to the world.
He is one of the very
few poets to report having had a ‘wet dream’ in the
course of a poem, and more
than once recalls spending the night with a
prostitute. Ku
Sang’s wife died in 1994, and his two sons also
predeceased him. He leaves a
daughter, Ku Ja-myeong, who only a few weeks after his
death received the 2004
Catholic Literary Award. At his funeral, the presence
of several people in
wheelchairs reminded those present of Ku Sang’s
constant concern for the
handicapped, expressed in a number of extremely
generous donations in recent
years. Also, a few years ago he gave his very
important library to the town of
Waegwan and in 2002 a magnificent building housing it
was inaugurated. But Ku
Sang was already too sick to attend the ceremony. Translations of Ku
Sang’s poetry began to be published when he was
already over 70 and four volumes in English were
published, as well as volumes
in French, German, Italian, Dutch and Japanese. |