There
can be no real doubt that Ko Un (nb. ¡®Ko¡¯ is the family name, always written
first in Korean) has for long been Korea¡¯s foremost poet. And now he is one of
the world¡¯s leading poets. From the very outset of his life as a poet, in the
late 1950s, he was recognized as having rare talents, with his keen
sensitivity, outstanding powers of intuition, the breadth and depth of his
imagination and his skillful use of language, as well as the maturity of his
understanding of human life.
Ko
Un¡¯s life has been acclaimed as ¡°a prime example of ten-thousand-foot high
waves,¡± an ancient Korean expression indicating the link between suffering and
strength. He has long been called ¡°a phenomenon,¡± and is sometimes referred to
as ¡°the Ko Uns¡± instead of ¡°Ko Un¡± because of his productivity, unparalleled in
the history of Korean literature. He is often said to write a poem every time
he breathes.
A
Korean literary critic once said, ¡°It¡¯s as if he breathes his poems before
putting them to paper. I feel that his poems emerge from his lips rather then from
his pen.¡± Ko Un himself says, ¡°I am constantly liberating myself from the poems
I¡¯ve already written.¡± This suggests the enormously wide spectrum covered in
his creative activities.
The
legendary American beat-generation poet Michael McClure once said, after
reading Ko Un¡¯s poems, ¡°Ko Un¡¯s poetry has the old-fashionedness of a muddy rut
on a country road after rain, and yet it¡¯s also as state-of-the-art as a DNA
micro-chip. Beneath his art I feel the mysterious traditional animal and bird
spirits, as well as age-old ceremonies of a nation close to its history.¡± But
Allen Ginsberg probably summed it up as well as anyone ever could when he
wrote: ¡°Ko Un is a
magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscenti, passionate political
libertarian, and naturalist historian.¡±
2.
Ko Un¡¯s Life Story
Ko
Un was born in 1933 in the city of Kunsan in Korea¡¯s North Cholla Province when
Korea was under Japanese rule. He began to write poems after reading a
well-known leper-poet¡¯s poems. He experienced terrible suffering and witnessed
immense inhumanity in the early stages of the Korean War and in 1952, before
the war was over, he joined the Buddhist clergy in a state of deep despair. For
the next ten years he lived a life of Zen meditation, traveling the whole country,
living by alms. He founded the Buddhist Newspaper in 1957 and then left
the Buddhist community in 1962.
From
1963 to 1966 he secluded himself in the southern island of Cheju and led a life
of severe self-torment, running a charity school, for three years. During and
after his three years¡¯ extreme experiences on Cheju Island, he abandoned
himself to a nihilism full of desperation, alcohol abuse, insomnia and
attempted suicides.
Immensely
impressed by the self-immolation of the garment-worker Chong Tae-il, from 1972
he started engaging himself in current political and social issues. He soon
became a militant activist, opposing the dictatorial military regime. He took a
leading role as a key figure in the Korean struggle for human rights and the
labour movement. He established the Association of Writers for Practical
Freedom in 1974. He many times experienced arrest, house arrest, detention,
torture. He served several prison terms. He became representative of the
National Association for the Recovery of Democracy in 1974, vice-chairman of
the Korean Association of Human Rights in 1978, and vice-chairman of the
Association of National Unity in 1979. His obvious deafness is due in part to
beatings inflicted by the police when he was arrested in 1979.
Arrested
and tried in 1980, together with Kim Dae-Jung and hundreds of others, he spent
more than 2 years in military prisons, unsure from one day to the next if he
would not be taken out and shot. Freed from prison, in 1983 his life took on a
complete new shape. Ko Un married Lee Sang-Wha, a professor of English
literature, and they went to live in the countryside at Ansong, about two hours¡¯
drive from Seoul. Two years later Cha-Ryong, his only daughter, was born.
Marriage and family life brought a new degree of stability and happiness, which
resulted in his increasingly prolific creation.
He
was elected to be chairman of Association of Korean Artists, 1989-90, and
president of the Association of Writers for National Literature, 1992-93. He
served as a Delegate in the Committee of National Liberation in 1995. He was
invited to teach as resident professor at the graduate school of Kyonggi
University, 1994-98. He was invited to Harvard University as a Visiting
Research Scholar at Yenching Institute in 1999. He visited North Korea as one
of the special delegates for the inter-Korean Summit in 2000 and was called to
read a poem before the assembled representatives of the two Koreas to celebrate
the signing of the agreement.
He
was elected as a co-chairman of the National Trust of Korea in 2000. He was
invited to Verona, Italy to be a one of sixty constitutional members of World
Academy of Poetry which was organized by UNESCO in 2001. In the last few years
he has made many visits to North Korea; he is chairman of a joint North-South
project to compose a Pan-Korean Dictionary covering all the different forms of
Korean spoken today, a project involving dozens of scholars from both sides of
the 38th Parallel and other countries.
Under
the military regime he was not allowed to go abroad. It was only in 1992 that
he was issued a passport; since then he has been traveling extensively around
the world. Ko Un has been invited to numerous international poetry gatherings
and conferences. He has captivated audiences worldwide with the beautiful and
powerful Korean language, making them aware of the long, sad and turbulent
history of Korea and its culture and customs expressed through his poems.
Michael
McClure stated how deeply he was moved when he first went to Ko Un¡¯s poetry
reading: ¡°I first heard Ko Un at Berkeley, California. His poems laugh and
growl because they have their own cave within the poet who laughs in grief and
intoxication and growls in discontent and pleasure, and with much energy. I
knew I had found a brother poet from half-way around the world. California fog
passed on the street outside as Ko Un read a series of poems. Each poem was
vibrant drama as Ko Un¡¯s voice twisted the shapes of the vowels and sculpted
the consonants. In the world of poetry his reading is unique. There is no one
who reads like this. Ko Un uses his language with the intensity of one who was
forbidden to learn his native Korean language as a child, but learned it
anyway.¡±
Under
the military dictatorship, there was an official unwritten policy that his
works should not be translated . This may explain why he only became known to
the outside world when he was already in his sixties. Since 1991 Ko Un¡¯s works
have been and are being translated into all major Asian and European languages
and have received outstanding reviews. On his collection of Zen poems, Allen
Ginsberg said, ¡°This little book of Son (Zen) poems gives a glimpse of the
severe humorous discipline beneath the prolific variety of his forms and
subjects.¡± Gary Snyder also said, ¡°Not just holding his Zen insights/ and their
miraculous working tight to himself/ Not holding back to mystify,/ Playful and
demotic,/ Zen silly, real-life deep,/ And a real-world poet!/ Ko Un outfoxes
the Old masters and the Young poets both.¡±
Monk-poet
prior to 1962, Nihilist-poet until 1972, Dissident-poet until the 1980s, but
then, surely, simply Poet, Major Poet, Leading Poet, until today. Perhaps only
posterity is entitled to bestow the ultimate title of ¡°Great Poet.¡± He is certainly
entitled to be called ¡°Korea¡¯s National Poet.¡± As the former American Poet
Laureate, Robert Hass, has pointed out, what is amazing about Ko Un¡¯s writing
is the way he has reinvented himself every decade.
Most
of the poems he wrote in the earliest period, from 1952 to 1962, while he was a
monk deeply engaged in extremely challenging Zen practice, strive to represent
the futile and transitory nature of life. The poems are preoccupied with
illness, psychic wounds and death, while they are marked by a strongly
aestheticising sensitivity with symbolist overtones. The poet tries to explore
the meaning of the inscrutable culmination of life in terms of death. They are
deeply Buddhist and agonizingly human.
In
the period from 1962 to 1972, the main novelty that emerges is a sense of
naturalness and spontaneity. In this period, his way of looking at things is
dark and nihilistic, full of desperation and self-abandonment. Not
surprisingly, this period culminated in a nearly successful suicide attempt.
The
poems written between 1973 and 1983, the years of social turmoil as the
pro-democracy movement grew ever more intense, show yet another transformation
in Ko Un¡¯s poetics. They begin to be marked by his tragic awareness of Korean
history, which is deeply rooted in his acute sense of the miserable predicament
of the Korean people in the twentieth century.
From
1983, after his years in prison, Ko Un began to write numerous poems, including
the multiple volumes of Ten Thousand Lives and Paektu Mountain. Underlying
these are the effects of the events connected with the Kwangju Pro-Democracy
Movement of May 1980, when hundreds of citizens were killed by Korean army
troops, the poet¡¯s imprisonment and his confrontation with death. Confined in a
special section of a military prison, he conceived of a vast series of
narrative vignettes called Ten Thousand Lives, which is still in
progress, to represent every person he had ever known. He also resolved to
write a multivolume epic of the Korean Independence Movement under Japanese
rule, Paektu Mountain.
Almost
forty books have poured out since then. A critic once called it ¡°a great
explosion of poetry.¡± Many critics call attention especially to the language in
the two grand epics, terming it a ¡°language of liberation¡±—popular language
that is copious, loquacious yet not untidy, calm but crisp, and vividly
expressive. Robert Hass has said of Ten Thousand Lives that this is ¡°one
of the most extraordinary projects in world literature in this part of the
century.¡± Later Hass also wrote in The Washington Post that the poems of
are ¡°remarkably rich. Anecdotal, demotic, full of details of people¡¯s lives,
they¡¯re not like anything else I¡¯ve come across in Korean poetry.¡±
Ko
Un¡¯s acute sense of history and love for his people and country have made it
one of his dreams to see a unified Korea. Since the 1970s he has been writing
poems about the unification of Korea. He had already visited North Korea before
he accompanied President Kim to the historic reunification summit, and the result
was a volume of poems, South and North (2000). Together with his ardent
yearning for the country¡¯s peace, since the 1990s, his poetry aspires to attain
a vast open world of harmony, liberation and love where he can embrace all
beings in compassion. Ko Un¡¯s mind is always on the alert; and he confesses
that there are more things left to write than he has so far written.
In
the foreword to the collection Sea Diamond Mountain, Ko Un says of his
sense of poetic creation: ¡°If someone opens my grave a few years after my
death, they will find it full, not of my bones, but of poems written in that
tomb¡¯s darkness¡¦. Am I too attached to poetry? Because my poems exist
side-by-side with a farewell to poetry, my attachment is one aspect of a
deliverance from poetry.¡± He wants to make his entire life, even his grave, a
poem, while refusing to let himself be imprisoned by the effort to write poetry
as an end itself.
The
Sound of my Waves A bilingual edition
by DapGae (Seoul) / Cornell East Asia Series. 1996. (Selected Poems 1960-1990)
Beyond
Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems. Parallax Press
(Berkeley). 1997. (Out of print)
Ten
Thousand Lives. Green Integer Press (Los Angeles).
2005. (Selections from the first 10 volumes of the 20-volume Maninbo
series)
Little
Pilgrim. Parallax Press (Berkeley). 2005. (A
Buddhist novel)
Still
unpublished: Songs for Tomorrow (Selected poems 1960-2001) and Flowers
of a Moment (Brief poems) (Publication of both planned for 2006)
All
these are translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé with the late Kim Young-Moo.
Gary G. Gach assisted with the stylistic editing of several of these volumes.
Volumes by other translators are in preparation in the United States. These
books can be purchased from Seoul Selection bookstore, from the publishers, or
through the main online bookstores.
Arrows
Transformed
into arrows
let's all soar
together, body and soul!
Piercing the
air
let's go
soaring, body and soul!
With no way of
return
but transfixed
there
rotting with
the pain of striking home,
never to
return.
One last
breath! Now, let's quit the string,
throwing away
like useless rags
all we have had
over the years
all we have
enjoyed over the years
all we have piled
up over the years
happiness
and whatever
else.
Transformed
into arrows
let's all soar
together, body and soul!
The air is
shouting! Piercing the air
let's go
soaring, body and soul!
In dark
daylight the target is rushing 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, brave
arrows, our nation's arrows!
Hail, Warriors!
Spirits of the fallen!
Ch¡¯oi
Hong-kwan, our maternal grandfather,
was so tall his
high hat would reach the eaves,
scraping the
sparrows¡¯ nests under the roof.
He was always
laughing.
If our
grandmother offered a beggar a bite to eat,
he was always
the first to be glad.
If our
grandmother ever spoke sharply to him,
he¡¯d laugh,
paying no attention to what she said.
Once, when I
was small, he told me:
¡®Look, if you
sweep the yard well
the yard will
laugh.
If the yard
laughs,
the fence will
laugh.
Even the
morning-glories
blossoming on
the fence will laugh.¡¯
Indangsu
What is our
country's deepest point? Indangsu.
Where are our
country's deepest thoughts found?
Not in Toegye,
the noted scholar,
but in the firm
resolve of one destitute girl
from Mongkumpo,
by the name of Sim-ch'ong.
Come, clouds,
driving furious!
Beat out, deep
drums!
Sharp waves in
Mongkumi Straits,
tear away at
the loose rock slabs!
Open your eyes,
everyone!
Blind father,
open your eyes!
Go sell
yourself for sixty bushels of rice!
Little girl,
poised on a gunwale
with seventy boats
at your water burial
out there off
Changsan Cape:
your body's the
world with its icy winds,
your body's the
world rising up again,
your body's now
the lotus blossom.
One body freely
tossed
with your head
muffled in deep blue skirts,
tossed into the
water off Changsan Cape:
awake now,
world! Awake, everyone,
like a battle!
After being a
battle speeding,
with all our
people wielding their tools,
the battle can
turn into a dance
and merrily go
dancing along!
Look: the world
made new!
With open eyes!
Sim-ch'ong, ah,
Sim-ch'ong, my dear!
A
list of all Ko Un¡¯s main works
Ko
Un has written far more than any other Korean poet, publishing some 140
volumes, including 50 volumes of poems. A collection of his Complete Works
published a few years ago filled nearly 40 very substantial volumes. He keeps
saying that if the quantity of his works were to compromise the literary
quality of his writing he would immediately stop. His poems manifest an immense
diversity: epigrams of a couple of lines, long discursive poems, epic,
pastoral, and even a genre of poems he has himself created, which we may term
the popular-historical poem, like those found in the 20 volumes so far
published of Ten Thousand Lives.
(All
of the following are in Korean, of course, the titles are translated here for
convenience.)
Other
World Sensibility(1960), Seaside
Poems(1966), God, the Last Village of Language(1967), Senoya,
Senoya: Little Songs(1970), On the Way to Munui Village(1977), Going
into Mountain Seclusion(1977), Early Morning Road(1978), Homeland
Stars(1984), Pastoral Poems(1986), Fly High, Poems!(1986), The
Person Who Should Leave(1986), Your Eyes(1988), My Evening(1988),
The Grand March of That Day(1988), Morning Dew(1990), For
Tears(1991), One Thousand Years¡¯ Cry and Love: Lyrical Poems of
Paektu Mountain(1990), Sea Diamond Mountain(1991), What?—Zen
Poems(1991), Songs on the Street(1991), Song of Tomorrow(1992)
The Road Not Yet Taken(1993), Songs for ChaRyong(1997), Dokdo
Island(1995), Ten Thousand Lives, 20 Volumes(1986-1997), Paektu
Mountain: An Epic, 7 Volumes(1987-94), A Memorial Stone (1997), Whispering(1998),
Far, Far Journey(1999), South and North(2000), The Himalayas(2000),
Flowers of a Moment(2001). Poems Left Behind (2002).
Cherry
Tree in Other World(1961), Eclipse(1974),
A Little Traveler(1974), Night Tavern: A Collection of Short Stories(1977),
A Shattered Name (1977), The Wandering Souls: Hansan and
Seupduk (1978), A Certain Boy: A Collection of Short Stories(1984), The
Garland Sutra (Little Pilgrim)(1991), Their Field(1992) The
Desert I Made(1992), Chongsun Arirang(1995), The Wandering Poet
Kim, 3 volumes(1995), Zen: A Novel, 2 Volumes(1995), Sumi
Mountain, 2 volumes(1999)
Born
to be Sad(1967), Sunset on the G-String(1968),
Things that Make Us Sad(1968), Where and What Shall We Meet Again?—A
Message of Despair(1969), An Era is Passing(1971), 1950s(1973),
For Disillusionment(1976), Intellectuals in Korea(1976), The
Sunset on the Ghandis(1976), A Path Secular(1977), With
History, With Sorrow(1977), For Love(1978), For Truth(1978),
For the Poor(1978), Penance to the Horizon(1979), My Unnamable
Spiritual(1979), Flowers from Suffering(1986), Flow, Water(1987),
Ko Un¡¯s Correspondence(1989), The Leaves Become Blue Mountain(1989),
Wandering and Running at Full Speed(1989), History is Dreaming(1990),
How I Wandered from Field to Field(1991), The Diamond Sutra I
Experience(1993), Meditation in the Wilderness(1993), Truth-Seeker(1993),
I Will Not Be Awakened(1993), At the Living Plaza(1997), Morning
with Poetry(1999)
Old
Temples: My Pilgrimage, My Country(1974), Cheju
Island(1975), A Trip to India(1993), Mountains and Rivers, My
Mountains and Rivers(1999),
Literature
and People(1986), Poetry and Reality(1986), Twilight
and Avant-Garde(1990),
A
Critical Biography of Yi Jooung-Sup(1973),
A Critical Biography of the Poet Yi Sang(1973), A Critical Biography of
Han Yong-Un(1975)
Son
of Yellow Soil: My Childhood(1986), I, Ko Un,
3 Volumes (1993)
Selected
Poems of the Tang Dynasty(1974), Selected
Poems of Tufu(1974),
Chosa:
Selected Poems by Kulwon(1975)
Several
works of old Korean poetry and songs.
To
say nothing of some Children¡¯s Books