Portions of translated poems from "Aspects of Diaspora in Modern Korean Poetry" by Sŭnghŭi Kim, translated by Brother Anthony (An Sonjae)
A chapter in Diaspora
in Korean (Immigrant) Literature. Ed. Seong-Kon Kim and So-Hee Lee. The International Association of
Comparative Korean Studies and Seoul National University American Studies
Institute. 2004.
(. . .)
Kim
Tonghwan¡¯s long epic poem Kukgyŏng ŭi pam (Night at the frontier, 1925) depicts
the appalling poverty sweeping through colonized Korea, a veritable land of
death, and the dreadful existence of refugees living along the Tumen River who
risked their lives crossing the river marking the frontier, obliged to seek for
food in Manchuria. The poem, the first-person narrator of which is a wife who
has sent her husband away, evokes her unending fear for her husband¡¯s fate,
after he left in a cart carrying contraband salt for fear of the boarder guards
and of the bandits on the other side of the river:
Ah,
has he got safely across?
Tonight
has my husband crossed
the
Tumen River without accident?
Dark
police guards in overcoats come and go
guarding
the frontier marked by the river—
up
and down busily, he must not be discovered,
has
he got across safely?
As
he rides all night long
on
a cart carrying smuggled salt,
the
anxious young woman feebly turns the spinning wheel,
simply
staring into the fish-oil lamp
and
the northern winter¡¯s night slowly passes.¡¯
The
poem¡¯s poetic space is a village on the frontier close to the Tumen River, the
time is a winter¡¯s night. In this extreme time and place, as the wife worries
about the fate of her husband on his journey to smuggle salt into Manchuria,
every sound that strikes her ear seems like a herald of death:
She
hears a sharp sound, ¡®Oy!¡¯
suddenly
emerge from somewhere underground.
From
the west something coming, a password,
The
villagers are confused and shudder in fear; the wife alone
reckons
it¡¯s her husband¡¯s voice, strikes her breast,
sighs
a long sigh.
It
was just the sound of forest rangers coming down late
amidst
the snow storm after burning charcoal.
Wrapped
in the mournful soughing of the wind
that
sounded like a sick man¡¯s last groan,
a
¡®tang¡¯ sound split the night sky.
While
people listened to the sound of noisy foot-steps,
turning
pale with fright at the thought that
another
accident had occurred,
holding
their breath,
the
wife reckons it¡¯s about her husband
struck
down before ever he can cross the river,
and
grasping the door-frame, she weeps sobbing.
Winter
lasts three months and when the starlight permit
there¡¯s
a sound of fishermen cutting through the ice.
Within
this evocative poetic space, there is not even a trace of the crowds of
refugees.
and
the telegraph lines permitting
international
exchanges weep much more.
Houses,
flocks of white sheep, the mountain valleys,
the
donkey in the stable all cry likewise. Today is so cold
there
are almost no people on their way to Manchuria.
There
are almost no people on the move tonight,
those
people from Hamkyŏng who night after night,
bearing
bundles, cross over, lonely,
crossing
the river that cuts across frozen wastes.
These
last are the wretched refugees who, unable to live under Japanese imperialism,
have left their homes, and are crossing the Tumen River on their way to
Manchuria.
With
a shaking hand, the wife removed the scrap of rag.
There
a corpse lay, bathed in its congealed blood.
With
a cry, the wife collapses.
¡®It¡¯s
true, he was shot by bandits. In the village on the other side.¡¯
As
he speaks, the carter wipes his eye with a fist.
Moonlight
like pure gold shone down on the man¡¯s corpse,
thirty
years old, eldest son, shot by bandits.
¡®That
shot just now, that cursed bandit, Ah, God, No!
The
icy waste is divided again.
The
three people weep long through the night,
their
tears freezing.
The
next morning, the sun infallibly emerged,
rising
above the fields and thatched cottages;
far
off, the wind sent the clothes of those crossing
into
Manchuria flapping.
In
the end, then, the husband of the first-person narrator wife is shot by bandits
and is brought back a frozen corpse, and during his wretched funeral (¡®his body
trussed in a coarse hemp gown¡¯), the sound of people crossing into Manchuria,
even at the risk of becoming homeless wanderers, rings across the frozen waste.
As
they bury the body, that ¡®shows the fate of those forced to flee,¡¯ the
villagers reflect, ¡®Ah, we¡¯ll end up like that, too!¡¯ as they acknowledge
mockingly the wretched destiny of one who fled from the colonized land.
Referring to those on the move to Manchuria, leaving in quest of a new land,
within a dreadful reality far from any promise of rich fields and a secure
future, this poem demonstrates clearly that the ¡®life¡¯ of Koreans under
colonial rule is set at a crossroads: either risking one¡¯s life, crossing the
Tumen River and becoming a migrant in Manchuria, or facing death by starvation
and poverty under colonial rule at home.
(. . .)
Tales
of refugees and migrants who have lost their nation and gone wandering are also
a characteristic feature of the poems of Yi Yong-ak, whose original home was Kyŏngsŏng
in North Hamhŭng Province. To the migrants, the Tumen River is the frontier of
their beloved home, the Korean peninsula, while the land called China is
reported to hold anti-Japanese guerillas, and the leaders of the Provisional
Government in Exile, and now they are in Kando where there is reported to be
land available for clearing, and one of his poems about the separations under
Japanese imperialism, ¡®Tuman Kang¡¯ (Tumen River), contains a play on
words between ¡®Kohyang and T¡¯alhyang¡¯ ¡®home-land and lost-land¡¯.
I
bow my head like a sinner, silent as an elephant.
You,
Tumen River, our river,
I
sat in the train speeding across your hills
without
any trace of pride or freedom.
There
is nothing to be seen,
your
breast is frozen.
but
I know,
a
part of your current is unceasingly flowing
toward
the sea, your necessary destination.
Now
the train is speeding as a train should,
while
in the fields across the river in the raging wind
my
young life
stands
as if waiting for something, as if frozen to the spot
while
my cursed fate simply prepares night over night.
Do
not sleep, you river of ours.
Sorrow
is thirsty, as if treading on your breast tonight again,
the
frozen path is harsh, the journey long.
Are
there no black wings
that
will deign to cover the eyes of my heart?
Tumen
River, you, our river.
I
am off to North Kando.
Looking
out over Kangwŏn Province,
I
am so lonely I have forgotten how to weep.
(From:
Yi Yong-ak, ¡®Tumangang nŏ uri ŭi kang a¡¯ (Tumen River, you, our river.))
(. . .)
¡®Hyŏnhaet¡¯an
is eternally a straits for the young¡¯ Im Hwa wrote in his essay ¡®Hyŏnhaet¡¯an,¡¯
in which it is possible to see its value as a symbol of the modern.
Art,
scholarship, unshakeable truth . . .
such dreaming
thoughts turning high above Tokyo,
then after
learning all, gaining all skills,
and once
again riding over the waves of this sea,
in the dark
night of my sorrowful home
I will become
a star burning more brightly than any torch.
My youthful
heart surges higher than the waves of the sea.
In one of Im
Hwa¡¯s poems contained in the volume Hyŏnhaet¡¯an, ¡®Romanticism of the
Straits,¡¯ the symbolic value of the Genkai Sea is summarized as ¡®a romanticism
of the heart gazing at the long shadow cast by the Japanese Islands¡¯ and to the
youthful speaker of the poem, its ¡®I,¡¯ the homeland is nothing but darkness and
night in which he suddenly appears, eager to kindle and illuminate the darkness
by means of his enlightened reason and passion as ¡®a star burning more brightly
than any torch.¡¯ The Genkai Sea becomes an image as a ¡®sea of hope across which
I return after learning art, scholarship, truth¡¯, a romantic view of the
straits.
Yet
in another poem from the same volume, ¡®Nunmul ŭi haehyŏp¡¯ (Strait of tears),
the Genkai Sea, quite opposed to that romantic view of the straits, is termed ¡®sea
where a new fate screeches like a crow,¡¯ a sea full of death and ¡®tears,¡¯
fateful separations, thanks to the history of suffering of all who have been
colonized.
Child, the
night on the straits is so fearful.
Is it really
the wind that is driving forward this great boat we are on? Or the waves?
Ah, surely it¡¯s
the strange destiny of what is called the Genkai Sea?
You and I are
crossing this sea like logs roped together.
Here the
Genkai Sea is a place of death where the Korean people float about ¡®like logs
roped together,¡¯ and at the same time, a sea of the imperial power ruled by ¡®foreign
curses.¡¯
In
the poem ¡®Hyŏnhaet¡¯an,¡¯ the ¡®strange destiny¡¯ of the Genkai Sea set
between the imperial power and the colony is expressed in a complex way:
The waves of
this sea
have been
high since long ago.
(. . .)
But now
white faces
have grown hard
in foreign
water, wind and rain,
while heavy
tasks
have bent
every weary back like those of farmers.
I know the
pitiful names of several people
who have
drifted away, scattered on this sea like so many petals.
Some crossed
over but never returned.
Some returned
and died at once.
Some, there
is no knowing if they are alive or dead.
Some wept,
defeated.
If among them
any shamefully sold
hope, resolve
and pride,
I have no
wish to remember that now.
Thus
the Genkai Sea is a ¡®sea of hope¡¯ bringing the youth of Chosŏn face to face
with a new Modernity but it is also a sea of calamity, with people who go but
do not return. Certainly there is the Hyŏnhaet¡¯an that provokes the romantic
cry of hope ¡®Hyŏnhaet¡¯an, for ever our straits!¡¯ but while people are still on
board the ships crossing it, it sees the start of the sufferings and ruin of
the colonized people:
Deep down in
cheap cabins in hard beds
mothers
learned to cry;
in the feeble
lamplight, fathers sighed.
In the
painful bitter weeping
of babes that
have lost their parents
what sin was
there?
I remember
vividly the foreign word
that put to
silence the sound of weeping.
So
the cabins of the ferries crossing back and forth across the Sea of Genkai
become loci of the pain of separation, spaces of oppression / oppressed
expressing the psychological tension between colonizers and colonized, the
power-relationship of domination / submission. At the same time, they are
spaces where a foreign language oppresses, a cruel word in Japanese bursting
out to quell the crying of a baby that has lost its parents.
Oh! One day
one day far
far in the future,
together with
our history of pain
I know that
your wretched lives and hidden names
will be
written large.
When the
morning star shines on your names
inscribed
upon the huge rough stone of the ruins
left when all
has become past history:
¡®--------- -----------
of the 1890s,
the 1920, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 19xx,¡¯
the waves of
the Genkai Sea will whisper your life stories
among
beautiful legends, like when we as children
used to drive
shoals of fish into the shallows.
But
meanwhile, we are still on the high waves of the sea.
Thus
the Genkai Sea is a space full of hope for all the young Koreans heading for
the imperialist land in order to obtain wealth, new knowledge, modernity and
hope, while enduring pain and anguish, truly a sea of Diaspora.
(. . .)
Sim Yŏnsu¡¯s
poem ¡®Manju¡¯ (Manchuria) expresses the agonies of the Koreans of the
time, with nowhere to call their own.
Leaving home,
hoping for a better life,
unable to
live well in a foreign land,
in every
place I went
I ever opened
my spreading heart
in vain.
Resolving
with a restless heart to get rewarding work,
sailing up
the East Sea in a fishing boat,
the place we
reached
was a vast
plain.
A wide-open
spot
exposed to
the bitter north wind,
the thoughts
we had nourished of setting up tents,
giving our
traveling bodies rest
were nothing
but a wanderer¡¯s dreams.
Sorrowful,
pitiful parents and siblings,
efforts to
endure nakedness and starvation,
still painful
memories of tears
were all the
bloodstains marking our colonized history.
The
tents set up on the barren steppes of Manchuria are an image symbolizing the
lives of those refugees and migrants.
(. . .)
Im Hwa left
Seoul in 1947 and went to Pyŏngyang; he followed the invading North Korean
forces at the start of the Korean War, returning to Seoul and going on with
them as far as the Naktong River before the intervention of the UN forces
routed the North Koreans, at which he again crossed the 38th
Parallel. Forced to flee northward beyond Pyŏngyang as far as the Manchurian
border, he longed to see the daughter Hyeran, nineteen years old, whom he had
left behind in the South and in December 1950 published ¡®Nŏ ŏnŭ kos e
ittnŭnya¡¯ (Where are you?).
What are you
thinking, where are you in this
snowstorm
with its icy wind,
with your
hair still covering your forehead,
braided round
your glowing face?
Are you high
in the blustery hills,
thinking of
your father
with his
grizzled hair?
Are you out
standing on a path through the fields
at sunset,
thinking of your mother
who was
always in agonies with her heart frail as paper?
(. . .)
Now your
father, leaving the clear-voiced Naktong River
has come to a
deep mountain valley in Chagang Province
where every
rapids in the lengthy streams is weeping
and the fold
upon fold of cliff-like mountains,
passing so
many villages burned and destroyed
by the
vicious enemy,
having
visited our beloved Seoul and Pyongyang,
and is
thinking of you, who can have no idea where I am,
and singing this
song,
my darling
child.
(. . .)
If you do not
die but survive
and are able
to meet with me again,
under our
nation¡¯s fluttering flag
in the joy of
victory we will celebrate
our meeting
in tears, and if ever, alas,
you have
departed this life,
and do not
return though I call and call,
if you cannot
hear my hoarsely calling voice,
your father¡¯s
warm hand, your mother¡¯s trembling hand,
your younger
brother¡¯s little hand,
the hard
hands of our comrades
in that
lonely, far-off place . . .
(. . .)
Deep at night
while winds weep unceasing all night long
in some
distant heaven,
know that
your grizzled-haired father,
your mother
in agonies with her heart frail as paper,
your little
baby brother
cannot sleep
thinking of you.
My darling
child.
Where are you
now?
(. . .)
Chŏn
Ponggŏn was a poet who left the North.
Late February
waiting for a
boat
on a quayside
of a river
flowing
through hills,
I suddenly
realized
that was the
very spot
where one day
in spring 1951
my comrade in
arms ¡®K¡¯ met his death
during a
river crossing operation.
As the sun
was setting,
about to
board the ship that had arrived,
I picked up a
stone, white like a rotting bone,
from the icy
water on the quay
where the
spring snow had melted.
It looked
like a bone from a bird¡¯s wing.
Over toward
the rapids, where dark was already falling,
a bird was
flying, name unknown. (From:
¡®Tol (Stone) 1¡¯)
If
the stone, absorbing into itself the agonies of war and the death of a comrade
and enduring the processes of time, is seen as a symbol for the thirsty life of
the victim of warfare, the bird represents that victim¡¯s dream of liberation,
longing to gain freedom even in spite of death.
One stone
buried in a sandbank
has no words.
Turning into
a great bird
flying
through the sand of the sandbank,
it has no
words.
(. . .)
Pak
Namsu was originally from South Pyŏngan Province, like Chŏn Ponggŏn, then he
fled South at the time of the retreat of the North Koreans in January 1951, and
finally moved to the US.
In a foreign
land, amidst foreign people,
I¡¯ll just be
alone. And
maybe there
will never again be
a chance to
meet old friends
in the region
of Myŏng-dong or Kwanghwamun.
Just as,
after leaving mother¡¯s breast at home,
there could
be no returning to her,
once we
leave, sad, sad fate decrees
there is no
going back again. (From: ¡®Sŏul esŏ¡¯ (In Seoul))
I am a wing.
Seen from high up, Seoul
gets smaller
and smaller until now
it¡¯s just one
grain of sand. Down there
for a long
time I wept, laughed, fought,
lived
smelling the smells of really close people.
(. . .)
dipping its
wings, the D.C. 10 circles in farewell. Now
I too,
dipping my wings,
make the sad
circle of my slanting life. (From:
¡®Isu¡¯ (Taking off from worries)
Thus,
by the image of the bird he depicts what life is to a poet who parted from his
mother and settled in the South at the time of the early 1951 retreat, lost his
family, then took leave of his friends in the South through his move to the
United States.
Sitting on
the beach at Santa Monica,
gazing far
out to the west
one oriental,
I, Pak Namsu, think of my homeland
away west,
but in fact
to the east
where the sun rises.
Of my
countrymen, those pitying seagulls
rising and
falling in my breast, their sobbing cries.
Those
mournful movements.
(From: ¡®Sŏjjok, kŭ sirŭn dongjjok¡¯
(Westward, or rather eastward))
The
very life of Koreans living within the situation of division is a seagull,
indeed all life in troubled times is that of the seagull.
A seagull
takes the wrong turn
down a street
between skyscrapers.
A seagull
that once cried sadly
in Pusan
harbor!
No reason for
withholding tears,
let¡¯s weep
the troubled age
like Tu Fu,
like Tu Fu.
weeping sad
days of heaviness
perhaps in
Namp¡¯o, perhaps in Tadaep¡¯o,
perhaps
beside the Hudson River.
(From: ¡®Maenhat¡¯an ŭi kalmaegi¡¯ (Gulls of
Manhattan))