Words That Span Generations

By Brother Anthony (First Published in The Korea Times, June 6, 2001)

Saturday, Oct. 20, was ``Culture Day.'' At an annual ceremony the Minister of Culture and Tourism distributed official decorations to a variety of cultural figures, including writers, film directors, and traditional musicians. One of the top awards went to the poet and critic Kim Su-Young, while another was for another poet, Shin Kyong-nim. These awards are quite regularly awarded posthumously, even many years after a person's death. Kim Su-Young was killed in a car accident in 1968, when he was in his mid-40s. His widow received the citation in his place. By coincidence, a volume of translations of poems by Kim Su-Young and Shin Kyong-nim, together with works by a younger poet, Lee Si-young, was published in the United States only a few days before the ceremony.

The three poets were born at 14-year intervals, in 1921, 1935 and 1949, and the idea of bringing their work together in a single volume originated with my co-translator, Professor Kim Young-Moo of Seoul National University's English Department, a well-known critic and poet. Although each of the three is very different, he realized, they share a common concern _ the need for poetry to speak with the vividness of a living voice. Their poems reflect in varying ways the lives of ordinary people at critical moments in modern Korean history. Therefore the volume has the title ``Variations,'' derived from the title of a poem by Kim Su-young.

Kim Su-Young studied in Japan for a while, and also at what is now Yonsei University. He was a gifted intellectual, interested in the avant-garde literary movements in Japan, Britain and the U.S. His first published poems (in a 1949 anthology of poems by young writers) were typical of much poetry written in Japan and Korea at the time _ difficult poems full of arcane symbolism, after the manner of the movement known as Modernism, best known by the work of T. S. Eliot. Kim was deeply marked by the Korean War, when he was forced to work for the invading Communist Army for a while; this meant that when the tide turned, he was interned by the anti-communist forces in a prisoner-of-war camp in Koje-do. In 1960, he was an ardent supporter of the students who led the April 19th Revolution, in which many were killed before Syngman Rhee stepped down, but he soon realized that Korean society would not follow the students' and intellectuals' idealism. Much of his poetry is a reflection of hope under trial.

From May 1961, Korea was ruled by the military and Kim found himself a spokesman for the dissident, socially conscious side of intellectual and literary society. He was by now working in journalism and becoming well known as an essayist. The conservative military encouraged those writers and critics who claimed that literature should be entirely concerned with aesthetics and have nothing whatever to do with social issues (except for promoting very general humanistic values) or politics. In a noted essay, he wrote in response to that opinion: ``All avant-garde literature is subversive. All living culture is essentially subversive. Quite simply because the essence of culture is the pursuit of dreams, the pursuit of the impossible.''

It was in the 1960s, as part of the same exploration of the relationship between poetry and life, that he realized that the language of Korean poetry was largely sterile because a sense of literary ``decorum'' was preventing poets from using the everyday language of ordinary people. He therefore set out to write poetry using ordinary language, colloquial expressions and such, although his work remained mostly far more ``intellectual'' than was usual in Korean poetry.

Kim died, but his ideas had been shared by a generation of younger writers. One was Shin Kyong-nim. Born in Chongju, North Chungchong Province, he was first recognized as a poet when a few poems were published in 1956. His life story is a striking one, for after that, he withdrew from literary activities and spent about 10 years working as a farmer, a miner, and a merchant while sharing the life of the laboring classes, now sometimes known as the ``minjung.'' Later he traveled through Korea collecting the previously unrecorded folk songs of the rural communities. In 1973, he published ``Nongmu'' (``Farmers' Dance''), his first volume of poems, which was awarded the first Manhae Literature Prize the following year. Some of the poems from ``Nongmu'' were first published in the avant- garde review Changjak-kwa Pipyong in 1970, heralding his return to the literary scene.

We published a complete translation of ``Farmers' Dance'' a few years ago; it is available in Seoul bookstores, unlike this new volume, which is only available in the U.S. The most striking and controversial thing about Shin's poems was the way many were written using a collective ``we'' instead of an individualistic ``I'' to designate the assumed speaker of the poem. The earlier poems of the volume express the emotions of Korea's rural poor at the time when first war, then industrialization, had begun breaking up traditional rural communities. The last poems reflect life in the city slums to which so many young people moved. This poetry expresses a life- experience that had never before figured in Korean poetry, and is striking because it is so authentic, devoid of any trace of quaintness or artificiality.

Shin continued to write and publish; in recent years he has served as president of the Association of Writers of Peoples' Literature, and of the Federated Union of Korean Nationalist Artists. The review Changjak-kwa Pipyong (Creation and Criticism), mentioned above, is a vital link between all three poets. Originally founded as the mouthpiece for the writers who agreed with Kim Su-young and were therefore considered to be ``dangerous radicals'' by the establishment, it and its associated publishing company played a vital role throughout the 1970s and 1980s in defying censorship and giving expression to some of Korea's most dynamic, socially aware writing. The present head of the publishing branch is the third poet in the collection, Lee Si-young.

His life has not been as exciting as the others' but his poetry moves in directions shared by them. In many poems, he directs attention to the pain and the beauty of ordinary lives. He has been attentive not to overload his poems with words. Many are brief epigrams, remarkable for their humility in a culture where a lot of poetry strives to impress.

``Variations'' presents the Korean texts of selected poems by the poets with a translation on the facing page. It has an Introduction by Professor Yoon Ji-kwan of Duksung Women's University, while each poet's work is preceded by a brief biographical note.

A Waterfall

The waterfall drops over the lofty cliff with no sign of fear.

The uncontrollable spate drops

with no sense of falling toward anything,

making no distinction between night and day,

like a noble mind, never pausing for rest.

When nightfall comes, ox-eye and houses hid from sight,

the waterfall drops with upright sound.

The upright sound is its sound.

Upright sound calls out

to upright sound.

The water drops, falling like lightning,

drops without height or breadth

as if confounding sloth and rest,

not granting the mind a moment's rapture.

______ Kim Su-young

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.

____ Shin Kyong-nim

Night

Night drives the wind from distant fields,

dumping it on top of a fifteen-story building.

When I hear the wind gusting fiercely,

I long to get out into the fields

and turn into a beast brimming with furious love.

But night comes bringing an even stronger wind

that strikes again against the railings,

wanders off bleeding across the fields,

then at dawn turns into a powerful gale,

giving birth to blazing eyes

that refuse to yield before it.

______ Lee Si-young