Authors: Ko Un
Ko Un was born in 1933 in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, South Korea. He made his official debut as a poet in 1958 while a Buddhist monk. For a decade he practiced Seon meditation and travelled throughout the country.
After returning to the secular world in 1962, he hurled himself into a nihilism full of desperation and alcohol, producing many striking works. He was awakened to the social reality of his country by the self-immolation of a poor labourer, Jeon Tae-il, late in 1970 and became engaged in political and social issues, opposing the military regime and joining the struggle for human rights and the labour movement.
For more than a decade, he was, many times and for long periods, persecuted by the Korean CIA, with arrests, house arrests, detentions, tortures and imprisonments. In 1980 he was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment, but thanks to international efforts he was set free with a general pardon in 1982, after serving two and a half years’ imprisonment in solitary confinement.
He married at the age of 50, and then followed a period of productivity unparalleled in the history of Korean literature – what one commentator has called an ‘explosion of poetry’. The seven-volume epic
Mount Baekdu
, the first volumes of
Maninbo
, a five-volume autobiography, and countless books of poems, essays, and novels came pouring out. ‘He writes poetry as he breathes,’ a reviewer once said. ‘Perhaps he breathes his poems before putting them to paper. I can imagine that his poems spring forth from his enchanted breath rather than from his pen.’ Korean literary critics often call him ‘the Ko Uns’ instead of Ko Un, because of his incredible activity. A true volcano of productivity, Ko Un has mastered an immense diversity of poetic forms, from epigrams to long discursive poems, epics, pastorals, and even a genre he himself invented, ‘popular-historical poetry’, of which
Maninbo
is the prime example.
He was invited to spend time as a visiting research scholar at the Yenching Institute of Harvard University, at UC Berkeley, and also, more recently, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He is a Chair-Professor at Dankook University, Seoul. He is also
currently President of the Compilation Committee of the Grand Inter-Korean Dictionary.
Ko Un has received a score of prestigious literary awards and honours at home and abroad, including the Björnson Order for Literature (Norway), the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award (Canada), and the 2014 Golden Wreath Award of the Struga Poetry Evenings (Macedonia).
Some 50 volumes of his work have been translated and published in more than 25 foreign languages, Asian and Western.
On first meeting,
when a person should introduce himself by name,
he just mutters,
bowing his head.
When he leaves condolence money at a house in mourning
he never writes his name on the envelope,
so when the chief mourner meets him a few months later,
he hesitates to thank him, not sure
whether he paid a visit
or not.
Perhaps he hides his name out of humility,
preferring to have no nameplate or house number in this world
where people love to make their names known.
Or maybe that’s not the reason, either.
On general election days
all he does is put a mark on a paper and leave.
When it happens to be a fine day
and flocks of sparrows fly high,
does each individual bird have a name?
Why, a name is a person’s prison.
After the Armistice,
the village at the gates of Camp Reagan
in Pocheon, Gyeonggi province,
flourished as a brothel town for soldiers.
The instant the camp was abandoned
the town fell to ruin.
The leader of the town’s prostitutes
was Rita Kim,
born Kim Ok-suk.
After servicing some hundreds of white soldiers
and some hundreds of black soldiers,
she became the head of the prostitutes’ union,
spokesperson and leader
for the whores of Pocheon county.
Her walls were covered with certificates of appreciation
and letters of thanks from local county heads:
‘For your contribution to the modernisation of our land…’
Once the Americans cleared out, Korean soldiers moved in.
With the whores gone too,
all that remained of the town were a few small shops.
Kim Ok-suk, left alone, quickly aged and fell sick.
She even stopped swearing as she used to,
‘Men are nothing but dicks.’
During the mid-Joseon period,
Korea’s submission to China was abject.
In fact the Ming dynasty was on the wane,
but among Korean nobility
submission became all the more prevalent.
For example, faced with the question why
only Korea’s West Coast has high and low tides,
and not the East, they replied:
‘It’s because
China is the source of tides.
Since the West Sea is close to China
it experiences high and low tides,
whereas the East Sea is far away from China,
so no tides can reach there.’
The moment that was said,
the moon emerged from behind a cloud.
They were like dogs barking in that moonlit night.
She was probably just the right wife for a man like that.
Just right for her husband the wild boar
who did manual labour,
hurt his back
and was laid up in his room.
She was glib-tongued, that woman.
They had two sons
and three daughters,
kids who never took
to anything like school.
Instead, boys and girls alike,
they took to trouble, taking upon themselves
each and every accident,
from the slums all the way up to
the Willow Tree House at the end of Euljiro.
Early on, the oldest boy did time
in the juvenile wing of Seodaemun detention centre.
Beginning with him,
whenever a son or daughter came home after brawling,
Hong's wife would say,
âBack home? What for?
You should be rotting in the cemetery
in Manguri or Miari.
Scum of a prick's prick,
why haven't you croaked already?
Ayyy! You good-for-nothing, hundred-ton dead weight!'
And yet, though she was a really foul-mouthed woman,
once, when she saw a voluptuous waning moon,
on her way back late at night from the communal loo,
she exclaimed: âMy my my, just look at that goddamn moon!
Looks like the sweetheart I've spent ten million years longing for.'
Baek Un-hak rented a room in an inn in Wonjeong-dong, Jeju City
as a master of the
Book of Changes
,
of the
Four Pillars
and the
Eight Characters
.
Meanwhile, another Baek Un-hak was telling tall tales
as a fortuneteller in Jongno 4-ga, Seoul.
In fact, that Baek Un-hak took his name
from the famous fortune-teller Baek Un-hak of late Joseon.
Anyway, whatever the reason,
this other poor Baek Un-hak
(the one who’d crossed over to Jeju Island)
wore plain glass spectacles on his plain nose –
perhaps because his eyes alone had no authority –
and let a few hairs grow out in semblance of a beard.
Maybe in order to impress those who came to consult him,
he would add some ridiculous English
to the fortunes he told.
He also claimed that a true interpretation of the
Four Pillars
could be found in the philosophy of
fortunà
as taken back to Italy by Marco Polo.
He pretended to be very intelligent,
very learned.
When he got paid for thus cheating the islanders
day after day, he would go out drinking alone.
Back home, late at night, alone and very drunk,
he would wail and pound on the floor:
Why is it my fortune
that I must ever deceive people?
Such a person, so honest with himself,
might he not be mistaken for the ancient sage Kasyapa
or the apostle Peter?
Seong-suk’s mother
gave birth to her third daughter
as plums outside Jaha Gate were ripening.
On that day, as the plums were falling,
Seong-suk’s mother burst into tears
once she realised it was yet another daughter.
She cried, cried loudly, finding no reward in childbirth,
and feeling no hunger after.
So she had no idea at all
whether Seong-suk was born by night
or by day
or at what hour.
Not only Seong-suk’s mother,
but her father,
her grandmother, too, had no idea.
Seong-suk grew up
without a name,
her birth unregistered
and her mother always grumbling:
‘Begone with you, quickly,
go!’
Her father,
recalling Yi Seong-suk, a girl in Uijeongbu
who once showed him the way,
gave her that name.
Unsure of the day of her birth,
let alone the hour,
she grew up
a very pretty girl,
became a really beautiful young woman,
of such loveliness as is rarely found
even in distant lands –
Portugal, say,
or Sweden.
She’s known as the Generalissima of the dried fish booths
in Seongdong-gu’s Central Market.
If the woman in the next booth over
plays the coquette with a customer,
she cries out, ‘Bloody bitch, gone mad again.
She’s mad to do what she does by night
again in broad daylight.’
When the Generalissima shrieks,
all shut their mouths,
Shhhh!
in the dried fish booths,
in the fruit stalls beyond,
in the fresh fish shops,
no matter who’s in the wrong.
It’s like driest dust being driven from furrows by a strong wind.
Covered by thick awnings,
no sunshine enters the market all day long.
She seizes every opportunity
to squeal like a sow having its throat cut,
cursing her dead husband:
‘That goddamn heel, croaked first,
making all this trouble for me, the bastard.’
When it rains, water pools on the awning
then cascades down over her:
‘That goddamn Heaven,
goddamn God!’
When people buy dried fish from the Generalissima
for their family memorial rites,
their ancestors’ appetites are aroused.
Since the 1970s, cocks seem to crow any time they want,
so the spirits of ancestors can’t make out
when exactly it’s time to leave;
it’s only right, then, that their descendants
should at least arouse their appetites.
‘I hate that song most, “The dawn bell has rung…”
the Saemaeul Song,
*
I hate that most.’
There was a time you had to be ready to be arrested
if you said something like that.
Even speaking such words took too long.
Such is the dawdling dialect of Chungcheong province.
It’s not just in speaking.
Rising
from sitting
takes a long, long time, too.
When they go to Seoul from Daejeon station
they are sure to take the slow train,
which stops at every station,
at every station.
‘What would I take
a fast train for?’
When they cross the street,
they slowly start to cross
after coughing three or four times
long after all the other people have crossed.
If a companion urges them on:
‘What do you hurry for
so much?
If you hurry, even the rice isn’t properly cooked.
‘Look at the moon
at night.
It moves
slowly,
slowly,
as if not moving at all.
‘If we live by minutes and seconds, we’re done for.
It’s the same with living by hours.
‘Therefore we must have
a night
like half a day, like
early evening,
night,
and early dawn
when the cockerel comes late to the first flap of its wings.
What are you thinking?’
*
Song of the New Village (Saemaeul) Movement during the Park Jung-hee era.
Tapgol Park,
a place crowded with elderly folk,
where old men
covered in age spots
grab one another by the collar and sort of fight,
ah!… there he is.
Mansu Coffee Shop
on a side-street in Cheongjin-dong, Seoul,
a place crowded with elderly folk
…there he is.
A place where the elderly roll walnuts in their palms,
sinews squirming on the backs of their hands,
a place where they talk about everything,
shouting this
and that,
and pinch the buttocks of the girl serving coffee,
…there he is.
He’s a young man of thirty,
but when asked why he comes here
he says it’s the only place he feels comfortable;
when asked his age,
he says he’s sixty-five.
They say he was forced to do military service
after he lied about his age,
and his mind was affected
after a beating by a superior in the barracks,
so he was discharged on medical grounds,
and mentally he is old and mad.
Could be so:
the Tang genius, the poet Li Ho, wrote that
at twenty a man is already old.