UC Berkeley, April 21, 2006. Brother Anthony

Voices Translated: Modern Korean Poetry from So Chong-ju to Kim Kwang-kyu

This afternoon, I would like to try to situate the voices heard in some examples of translated Korean poetry within a more universal framework of reference and debate, before we go on to listen to the living voices of poets reading to us across boundaries.
We all know that “A poem should not mean But be,” as Archibald MacLeish said in his Ars Poetica (1926) but we should try to distinguish between various poems’ ways of being, or rather, of speaking. Put simply, most of the world’s short poems, those we tend to call “lyrics” or “songs,” are “spoken” by a generalized first-person voice that has only a vague link with the actual poet who wrote the poem; we do not expect such poems to express a very personal, private experience. When we sing “My love is like a red, red rose” we do not really wonder or need to know what particular person Robert Burns had in mind when he wrote it. Contemporary poetry has become far more directly personal, often quite confessional, and today the directly autobiographical quality of a poem’s voice is often asserted. But there are also still many poems where the speaking “I” is quite clearly not at all the poet, but a different person altogether, a kind of fictional, dramatic persona.
T. S. Eliot published in 1953 a lecture entitled “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in which he attempted to identify the essential quality of lyric poetry in terms of the voice speaking it. He identified three different voices in various kinds of poetry:

“The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself–or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse.” (109)

For Eliot, truly “lyric” poetry was of the first kind, a very personal kind of poetry that is in no sense addressed to any kind of audience but is “overheard” by readers. He went on to quote the German poet Gottfried Benn, who in his lecture “Probleme der Lyrik” suggested that the origin of a true lyric was “an inert embryo or ‘creative germ’” within the poet. Eliot then quoted two lines of Beddoes: “it is . . . a bodiless childful of life in the gloom / Crying with frog voice, ‘what shall I be?’” before going on: “ . . . the poet is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth, in order to obtain relief. Or to change the figure, he is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of form of exorcism of this demon.” (On Poetry and Poets, 106-7) Much earlier, in 1933, Eliot had written in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism that the lyric begins “with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm; hyperbolically, one might say that the poet is older than other human beings.” (155)
    In 1985, the critic Daniel Albright published a study, Lyricality in English Literature, in which he quoted Eliot, then challenged his idea:  

I believe that we should not look to the criterion of audience, or of fictitiousness, to distinguish the lyrical from its opposite. Intuition suggests that poems uttered by elaborate fictions are not necessarily less lyrical than poems spoken by a bland, inconspicuous I. (222)

But for someone trying to find criteria allowing us to make a significant distinction between the poems of Sŏ Chŏng-ju and of Kim Kwang-kyu, Albright has something better to offer at the start of his discussion:

W. H. Auden, in his essay on Robert Frost, says that every poem exists in a state of tense equilibrium between two competing tendencies, which he calls Ariel and Prospero, the spirit of unearthly fantasy and the spirit of unflinching truthfulness, fidelity to our actual miserable state. Ariel, says Auden, presides over the realm of imagination, in which images keep shifting and sliding effortlessly, beautifully, into other images, but in which nothing serious can happen. Ariel, then, is simply a disengaged, dispassionate, almost contentless creativity, an imagination so engrossed in the continual play of images that it cannot be bothered to attend to the real. (2)

Of course, in literary criticism nobody ever has the last word. In 2004, the poet and translator Charles Martin wrote in the New Criterion an article “The three voices of contemporary poetry” in which he commented:

The domain of Eliot’s first voice, that of the poet speaking to himself or to no one, has expanded considerably, in ways that he might not have foreseen. The private voice seems everywhere in poetry today. It may be argued that poetry began to lose its audience not when poets began talking to themselves or to no one–poets have always done that sort of thing–but when they began doing it as though there were no other choice, as though the possibilities for dramatic or reciprocal speech did not exist.

A little later, he quotes Robert Creeley’s poem “The Pattern” which begins “As soon as / I speak, I speaks,” then continues:

Creeley appears to be speaking to himself, or to no one, because there are no other options. The subject of his poem is, in fact, the impossibility of reciprocal discourse (. . .) The self that speaks creates a self aware of itself speaking, interposing that self-awareness between the speaker and the audience. (. . .) There is another voice current in contemporary poetry, resembling the private voice in its refusal of reciprocal speech, but different in its intention. I have taken to thinking of it as the prophetic voice, in that its intention is to speak for, rather than to, another.

Modern Korean poetry begins with a strong inclination to the intensely lyrical, symbolist poem, whether that is rooted in traditional forms, both native and Chinese, as is the case with Kim So-Wol, or in the European symbolism and imagism introduced by Japanese translations of the works of French Symbolists and Modernists. This current was challenged already during the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945) by calls for a socially relevant, functionally useful literature, as well as by a desire to introduce nationalistic subtexts expressing resistance to Japanese domination. Here, I believe, we can quite usefully introduce Auden’s sense of a conflict between an oriental Ariel of lovely, drifting images and a transposed Prospero of socially significant discourse.
After Liberation in 1945, with the triumphant return of the Korean language, the intensely lyrical poems of Sŏ Chŏng-Ju and other poets of the art-for-art’s-sake trend came to dominate South Korean poetry. In part this reflects a government-inspired, ideological imposition of critical norms provoked by the support given to socialism and, ultimately, to North Korea by many more socially oriented writers.
The first voice that I want us to hear is that found in the poems Midang (Sŏ Chŏng-ju) composed in the later 1930s, published in 1941 under Japanese domination. This voice is surely not to be understood as in any sense autobiographical; it seems ecstatic, esoteric even, resolutely “poetic” and it might in some ways recall Eliot’s image of the poet’s inner demon producing his lyrics. It is entirely the voice of Auden’s Ariel:

Noontide

The path winds between fields of crimson flowers
which picked and eaten yield sleep-like death.

Calling me after, my love races on,
along the sinuous ridge-road, that sprawls
like a serpent opium-dazed.

Blood from my nostrils flows fragrant
filling my hands as I speed along.

In this scorching noontide still as night
our two bodies blazing. . .

That intensely sensual lyricality, where the voice is far from being obviously the poet’s own, remains present, though no longer directly sexual, in the title-poem from the collection Kwichok-do (“Nightingale”) published in 1948, soon after Liberation:

Nightingale

The path my love took is speckled with tears.
Playing his flute, he began the long journey
to western realms, where azalea rains fall.
Dressed all in white so neat, so neat,
my love's journey's too long, he'll never return.

I might have tressed shoes or sandals of straw
woven strand by strand with all our sad story.
Cutting off my poor hair with a silver blade,
I might have used that to weave sandals for him.

In the weary night sky, as silk lanterns glow,
a bird sings laments that it cannot contain,
refreshing its voice in the Milky Way's meanders;
eyes closed, intoxicated with its own blood.
My dear, gone to heaven's end alone!

Here we have a kind of dramatic monologue in which we can sense a mythical dimension coming into play; the translator can only indicate by a footnote that the bird’s name is composed of Chinese characters meaning “Road back to the land of Shu,” echoing a legend that the plaintive call of the Scops Owl of nature is the ghostly voice of a Chinese prince who died in exile, longing for home. This poem’s speaking voice is female and it seems to echo classical Chinese models where a wife yearns for an absent husband. The lyricism lies partly in the evocation of romantic separation, intuitions of loss, but the final stanza takes that beyond the personal and into the cosmic realms.
It seems clear that Auden’s Prospero has no influence over such poems. In the years of Japanese rule, many other poets wrote in not unsimilar, highly lyric voices. The first generation of poets who began to write in South Korea after the Korean War (1950-53) can also for the most part be characterized as aestheticizing lyricists in a Modernist mould.
The renewal and transformation of Korean poetry, when it did come, may have been in part inspired by the new social challenges represented by the failure of the hopes for a more democratic, open society after the tragic sacrifice of young lives during the 1960 April Revolution, completed by the military coup of the following year; this coincides with the implementation of a policy of intense modernization by urbanization and industrialization that put an end to what was left of traditional Korean society.
Two different voices stand out in the renewal of lyric poetry at this time, the intellectual voice of the Modernist Kim Su-Yŏng, whose first poem dates from 1953 and the more spontaneous, homely voice of Shin Kyŏng-Nim, who started to write in 1956. In the years before 1960, Kim Su-yŏng wrote in the generally accepted, impersonal lyric manner, with considerable sophistication:

Prologue

I have been singing too many avant-garde songs.
I have been too neglectful of the beauty of stillness.
Trees! Soul!
For a moment, I will perch my weary body,
light as a sparrow, on your not so unseemly branches.
Maturing has been the task of every sage since Socrates,
putting in order
is the task of poets in this strife-ridden twentieth century.
Still the trees grow on; the soul, too, and precepts, commands.
While I belong
to a generation unable to forgive excessive commands,
though this generation is a night that demands
excessive commands.
I know how to sing like an owl in a night such as this.

A wretched song,
a filthy song, a lifeless song:
ah, yet another command.

That poem is dated 1957. It expresses in a particularly vivid, forceful way Auden’s tension between Ariel and Prospero, seeming to be a call for help from Prospero in a poetic world dominated by Ariel. But the events of April 1960 and their unsatisfactory aftermath obliged Kim Su-Yŏng to review his life’s and his art’s fundamental options, and he became the leader of a different avant-garde, notably by his call for the use of ‘ordinary language’ in poetry. Not that his own poetry became much more accessible. It is ironic that his last poem, destined to become his most famous, although it was still unpublished when he was killed by a bus one evening in 1968, is written in a far simpler style, because critics still argue bitterly about what Kim Su-yŏng meant to say by it. Even here, Ariel dominates:

Grass

The grass is lying flat.
Fluttering in the east wind that brings rain in its train,
the grass lay flat
and at last it wept.
As the day grew cloudier, it wept even more
and lay flat again.

The grass is lying flat.
It lies flat more quickly than the wind.
It weeps more quickly than the wind.
It rises more quickly than the wind.

The day is cloudy, the grass is lying flat.
It lies low as the ankles
low as the feet.
Though it lies flat later than the wind,
it rises more quickly than the wind
and though it weeps later than the wind,
it laughs more quickly than the wind.
The day is cloudy, the grass’s roots are lying flat.

By contrast, Shin Kyŏng-Nim’s first published volume, Farmer’s Dance (1973), remains in retrospect an amazingly innovative work. After nearly 10 years of poetic silence, he spoke out from among the laboring classes he had been living with, classes previously not thought to have any poetry to offer, in poems quite often using a plural “We” as speaking persona and finding the poetic within the arid and desolate realities of a Korea where urbanization was beginning to destroy what the war had spared of tradition. With Shin, as with the thoughtful poetry of Kim Su-yŏng, we seem to lose sight of Eliot’s exorcised demon, and if there is a lyric quality that transforms Shin’s experiences it probably comes from his deep relationship with the native folksong tradition, rather than from modernist notions or shamanistic possession. With him, we have a new sense of ‘reality’ and Prospero confronts Ariel without being able to send him off completely. Witness Shin Kyŏng-Nim’s own favorite poem:

Mokkye Market

The sky urges me to turn into a cloud,
the earth urges me to turn into a breeze,
a little breeze waking weeds on the ferry landing
once storm clouds have scattered and rain has cleared.
To turn into a peddler sad even in autumn light,
going to Mokkye Ferry, three days’ boat ride from Seoul,
to sell patent face-powders, on days four and nine.
The hills urge me to turn into a flower,
the stream urges me to turn into a stone.
To hide my face in the grass when hoarfrost bites,
to wedge behind rocks when rapids rage cruel.
To turn into a traveler with pack laid by, resting
on a clay hovel’s wood step, river shrimps boiling up,
changed into a fool for a week or so, once in thrice three years.
The sky urges me to turn into a breeze,
the hills urge me to turn into a stone.

Meanwhile, the earliest work of Ko Un emerged in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. It too was intensely lyrical, sensual, far removed from his later reputation as an ‘engaged poet,’ an ‘activist’ or a ‘dissident.’ In the face of his often repeated insistence that, when he began to write, he knew almost nothing of the poetry written before him and yet needed no master, we are thrown back on Eliot’s image of the lyric impulse as “an inert embryo.” Ko Un’s vast output is too broad a theme for a brief presentation such as this, but it is worth recalling that he still quite frequently compares his way of writing poetry to the way spirits speak through the lips of a possessed shaman. One example of his early, lyric voice would be:

SPRING RAIN

O waves, the spring rain falls
and dies on your sleeping silence.
The darkness in your waters soars above you
waves –
and by the spring rain on your sleeping waters
by spring rain even far away  
far-off rocks are changed to spring.
Above these waters where we two lie sleeping
looms a rocky mass, all silence.
But still the spring rain falls and dies.

Powerfully lyric stuff! Yet we should not forget that in 1983, preparing to publish his Complete Poems, Ko Un cancelled or rewrote most of the early poems on which his reputation rested, denouncing the ‘evil’ he felt was expressing itself in them. Eliot’s ‘demon’ was for him far too close to an uncontrolled passion, and of course the Latin word ‘furor’ was always used to indicate the overwhelming power of the inspiring spirit of both poetry and other kinds of oracle. Yet although Ko Un’s poetry has integrated the dimensions of history and of carefully researched biography in the 7 volumes of Baekdu-san or the 23 so far published of Ten Thousand Lives, his way of writing seems to remain close to the automatic writing sometimes practiced in seances. His poems, he claims, write themselves, as Ariel’s might. Prospero’s do not do that.
Ko Un’s voices are multiple, inevitably, and it is impossible to say much more about them here. Here is what may be considered his most famed poem, one that rang out at many demonstrations during the 1980s. What voice is speaking here is hard to say. Certainly we cannot say that the poet is speaking ‘to himself or to no one’ for rather here the poem is addressed by many to many. Perhaps that is what Martin meant by ‘prophetic’ poetry:

ARROWS

Body and soul, let's all go
transformed into arrows!
Piercing the air
body and soul, let's go
with no turning back
transfixed
burdened with the pain of striking home
never to return.
 
One last breath! Now, let's be off
throwing away like rags
everything we've had for decades
everything we've enjoyed for decades
everything we've piled up for decades,
happiness
all, the whole thing.
Body and soul, let's all go
transformed into arrows!
 
The air is shouting! Piercing the air
body and soul, let's go!
In dark daylight, the target rushes towards us.
Finally, as the target topples in a shower of blood
let's all, just once, as arrows
bleed.
 
Never to return!  Never to return!
 
Hail, arrows, our nation's arrows!
Hail, our nation's warriors! Spirits !

The continuing polarization of Korean literary circles, perhaps encouraged by writers’ differing responses to the politics and protests of the 1970s, led to an idea of there being 2 rival ‘schools,’ one putting the main stress on abstract values of aesthetic beauty and the portrayal of an abstract ideal of human dignity, the other demanding democracy and a literature related to the real life of ordinary people. But the generation of Korean writers who matured in the Park Jung-Hee years tended to feel the need for a combination of the values of both ‘schools,’ seeing no point in a poetry that was devoid of lyrical beauty, or utterly divorced from social reality. Perhaps equally important, it had become clear by then that every poet had to follow a different path, write in a personal manner.
I want to consider poems by three poets from this generation, Hwang Dong-Kyu, Mah Chonggi and Kim Kwang-Kyu, because they are, each in his own way, indicative of the changes in the Korean poetic voice. In them, the tension between Ariel and Prospero is harmonized in new, though differing, ways. They cannot really be considered to constitute any kind of ‘school’ but they have been personal friends for a very long time now, and obviously share many of the same ideas about what it is to be a poet. Behind them, of course, stand a host of other, older poets such as Pak Tu-jin, Kim Ch’un-su, and Cho Byŏng-hwa, for example, who encouraged this new generation.
Of the three younger poets just named, Hwang Dong-Kyu and Mah Chonggi both began to write and publish in or about 1960 and all three were young adults, students, at the time of the April Revolution. Hwang, son of a famous novelist and the oldest of them, remained closest to the symbolist lyric tradition inspired by Sŏ Chŏng-Ju. But he is far from Midang’s exotic mythologies:

When I See a Wheel

When I see a wheel I long to make it turn.
Cycle wheels, pram wheels, rickshaw wheels,
carriage wheels,
I long to make even turning wheels turn.
When I'm climbing a steep hill
I long to make even car wheels turn.

On the road everything is unseen
and seen, the childhood days I long to demolish are unseen
and seen, the woods front and back where
different flocks of birds used to chirp
are seen and unseen, the republic of short breath is unseen
and seen; the tangerines    piled on streetside stalls,
the pots upturned in the pottery store, people lying curled up:
before everything collapses, just once,
I want to make them turn, on the flying road.

Hwang’s poetry is still Modernist in the sense that it is often difficult, and not immediately, obviously personal in any confessional sense. But it never abandons the realities of life, either. By contrast, Mah Chonggi’s poetry has its origins in an intensely personal, real situation; many of his early poems were written out of the anguish provoked by his studies and experiences as a medical student and trainee doctor. Later poems had other origins, but many, if not all, are equally deeply rooted in personal realities. But Ariel is there, too, transforming even the darkest shadows. His early poems on clinical death are uniquely autobiographical:

Deathbed

When the light goes out in the westward sickroom,
the dark shadow of winter
passes beyond the low hills

and the chill bricks of the autopsy room
ring to the sound of a skull being sawed,
it’s no finale.

I first learned about
natural life in anatomy class.
That’s when the cold came.

On my lonely, youthful bed
I often found myself sentenced to death.
The dazzling vertigo of the remaining hours.
Don’t you see? The solitary deathbed
of the tall guy who gave up.
Don’t you see? This is no finale.

So, at last, we come to Kim Kwang-Kyu. His poetic history is particularly interesting because he first developed his poetic voice by translating German poetry, works by Heinrich Heine and Günter Eich, before ever beginning to write his own poems in Korean. Although he is only a couple of years younger than his two friends, being born in 1941, he did not begin to publish his own poetry until 1975, fifteen years later than them. Owing virtually nothing to previous Korean poetic models, consciously turning its back on them, his work enjoyed immediate popularity as a model for a new poetics for the new age that began in fact with the assassination of Park Chung-Hee and grew to maturity during the dictatorships of the 1980s. For the first time, it might be claimed, a poetic voice characterized by satirical humor was able to speak out, pointing its dart at the evils of dictatorship and the follies of everyday life in the modern city in subtle ways. With him, we might say, the shift away from Ariel in favor of Prospero is accomplished. But he shows us clearly that Prospero’s voice, too, is a poetic voice, not lyrical, perhaps, but cogent and clear-headed.
It is significant that Kim Kwang-Kyu’s first volume of poetry has the publication date October 20 1979 on its copyright page. Less than a week later, on October 26, the life of the dictator Park Chung-hee was brought to a sudden, violent end. As a result of that liberating event, his book was more actively restricted and repressed by censorship in the ensuing security clampdown than it might otherwise have been. But at the same time, that only served to give it fuller credentials as a work of major resistance, and in the years that followed some of his earliest poems became great classics in the struggle against dictatorship precisely because the dictatorship was too stupid to realize what they were about.
What voice is speaking in Kim Kwang-Kyu’s work? Not always his own, certainly, for even when the poem uses a first person singular ‘I’ we cannot be certain that the speaker is Kim Kwang-Kyu himself. Many are dramatic monologues set on the lips of the victims of modern society. He too does not disdain Shin Kyŏng-Nim’s collective ‘We’ speaker. Kim Kwang-Kyu is not much interested in celebrating directly the beauties of nature, in part at least because he is too acutely aware of the way human pollution has ruined the beauties of nature. He is one of the very first Koreans to express alarm over looming ecological disaster.
Before hearing him read, let me quote one of his most significant, earliest poems, Spirit Mountain:

In my childhood village home there was a mysterious mountain. It was called Spirit Mountain. No one had ever climbed it.

By day, Spirit Mountain could not be seen.
With thick mist shrouding its lower half and clouds that covered what rose above, we could only guess dimly where it lay.

By night, too, Spirit Mountain could not be seen clearly.
In the moonlight and starlight of bright cloudless nights its dark form might be glimpsed, yet it was impossible to tell its shape or its height.

One day recently, seized with a sudden longing to see Spirit Mountain—it had never left my heart—I took an express bus back to my home village.
Oddly enough, Spirit Mountain had utterly vanished and the unfamiliar village folk I questioned swore that there was no such mountain there.

About this poem, the late Kim Young-Moo wrote:

We may read this as a poem about the birth of a clear mind awakening from the falsehood of the world of ideals and dreams, all the yearning and nostalgia that we tend to experience in connection with childhood and home as well as anything essential and authentic. As we read this poem, that develops so serenely with its “I” carefully controlling feelings and betraying no emotions or thoughts, we are attentive to reflect in turn whether we too do not somehow suffer from a similar painful loss of a childhood home and its mysterious landscapes. At the center of the poem stands the mysterious mountain that is somehow there without being there, not visible yet glimpsed, not climbable yet present, and we are invited to perceive in the poem both the nature of the mountain and the mind which it continues to haunt. At one level there is a process of discovery; the spirit mountain is not located in space; it is no use taking a bus and going back to a place that is no longer there, for the mystery of the mountain has to be sought at other levels. The poem certainly does not report a simple loss of illusions; it does invite us to re-examine our evaluations of past experience.

As I wrote in the Introduction to “The Depths of a Clam,” “the first-person speaker in Kim Kwang-Kyu’s poems should not be too quickly identified with the poet himself. There is so natural a feel to the life stories and ‘confessions’ that many poems contain that the confusion is easily made. The speaker of many poems is rather a modern Everyman expressing in various ways the alienation and the bewilderment caused by modern city life. The alienation is very often expressed through an ironic contrast between the present and the past, between nature and society, or between the rural and the urban.
“In many poems Kim Kwang-Kyu refers to childhood memories of another, seemingly more human Korea in which, despite poverty, people were more attentive to each other and to fundamental values. This enables many Korean readers to sense his concerns very directly, for modernization and urbanization are such recent phenomena that the majority of the poet’s own generation were born in rural villages before moving to the cities with their parents in the 1970s or ’80s. Yet as Kim Young-Moo wrote, there is no sentimental nostalgia here, no deliberate attempt to romanticize childhood memories; but certainly a major strategy in Kim Kwang-Kyu’s work involves establishing contrasts that include notions of a lost Paradise. To that extent it would be possible to see in his world-view versions of an ongoing Fall.”
In his work, we can hear a voice characterized by “the spirit of unflinching truthfulness, fidelity to our actual miserable state” that Albright found on the Prospero side of his equation, the antithesis of Ariel. Yet the voice of his best poems is often one that inspires a sardonic smile, and it is also tempting to include him among Martin’s “prophetic” voices, for Kim Kwang-Kyu never speaks to draw attention to himself, but rather to raise questions about the way life is lived, or not lived, in today’s world. In that, he is intensely altruistic. Kim Kwang-Kyu is still almost unique among Korean poets. He writes about topics that should make us want to weep in a voice that makes us smile. Lyrical humor? A fourth voice of poetry, perhaps, emerging as Prospero attempts to teach Ariel just what the challenges and rewards of life in todays world consist of.

 

An Sonjae (Brother Anthony of Taizé)

Brother Anthony was born in 1942 in England. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford. In 1969, he joined the Community of Taizé in France. He arrived in Korea in May 1980, and was naturalized in 1994 with the Korean name An Sonjae. Since 1980, he has been teaching medieval and renaissance English literature in the Department of English Language and Literature at Sogang University (Seoul). Brother Anthony has published some 20 volumes of modern Korean literature in English translation, including 6 volumes of works by Ko Un, 5 volumes of poems by Ku Sang, 2 of poems by Kim Kwang-Kyu, and The Poet, a novel by Yi Mun-yol.


Kim Kwang-Kyu

Kim Kwang-kyu was born in Seoul in 1941. After graduating from the German Department of Seoul National University, he studied in Germany. He retired early in 2006 from his position as professor in the German Language and Literature department at Hanyang University. He initiated his literary career in 1975, after his return from Germany, with the publication of "Shiron" (Ars Poetica) and other poems in the review Munhakkwa Chisong. In the same year he published a volume of his translations into Korean of poetry by Heinrich Heine and Gunter Eich. This was followed in 1985 by a volume of translations of poetry by Bertolt Brecht. His published volumes of poetry include Urirul choksinun majimak kkum (1979), Anida kurohchi ant'a (1983), K'unaksanui maum (1986), Chompaengich'orom (1988), Aniri (1990), Mulkil (1994), Kajin kot hanado opchiman (1998) and Ch’ŏŭm mannatŏn ttae. (2003). A selection from his first three volumes was translated into English and published in England as Faint Shadows of Love (London: Forest Books) in 1991. A selection from all his published volumes was published in 2005 in the United States as The Depths of a Clam (White Pine Press.

THE DEPTHS OF A CLAM
Korean Poetry in Berkeley: Brother Anthony & Kim Kwang-Kyu

A Colloquium
with Translator Brother Anthony of Taizé
and Poet Kim Kwang-Kyu

Program:
1. Presentation by Brother Anthony
"Voices Translated:  Modern Korean Poetry from So Chong-ju to Kim Kwang-kyu"

2. Readings of Kim Kwang-Kyu’s poetry
Korean poems read by the Poet, English translations read by Zack Rogow

3. Comments and dialogue with Poet and Translators, including Chong Heyong who has translated Kim Kwang-Kyu’s work into German.

4. Reception

Kim Kwang-Kyu, born in 1941, is one of Korea’s most famous poets. He has published 8 volumes of poetry. His delicate satires sustained people during the dark years of dictatorship, while his ironic commentaries on the dehumanizing effects of modern city life have influenced many younger Korean writers. He recently retired from his position as professor of German literature at Hanyang University, Seoul.

Brother Anthony, born 1942 in England, belongs to the Community of Taizé (France). He has lived in Korea since 1980 and is professor of medieval English at Sogang University, Seoul. He has published some 20 volumes of translations of Korean poetry and fiction, including “The Depths of a Clam: Poems by Kim Kwang-Kyu” (White Pine Press, 2005)

Chong Heyong is Kim Kwang-Kyu’s German translator. She is professor in the German department of Hanyang University, Seoul.

Zack Rogow is a poet and translator. For many years he organized the popular Lunch Poems Readings at UC Berkeley. He is now editor and artistic director of Two Lines (The Center for the Art of Translation).