Authors: Ko Un
A young woman like very fresh young greens,
like young greens
newly washed three times in a flowing stream,
one such young woman,
having dropped out of middle school,
came and sat down in the chilly office
of the Cheongju Urban Industrial Mission.
The room grew even quieter.
Her job was to help a pastor
as bland as long-stored buckwheat jelly
or cold bean curd.
No end in sight once over the edge of the cliff.
Endless days of service.
On her face clean like young greens
appeared a freckle then another and another
like birds singing early in the morning
keeping each other company.
Writing petitions,
writing letters of complaint,
copying out manifestos,
drawing up agreements,
she also had to make visits here and there,
taking long-distance buses over bumpy, dusty roads.
With her face, which never knew make-up,
she devoted all her youth to service
and her laugh was always as it had been
a thousand years before.
No need to know her name.
He has no shoulders.
Shoulderless, he sits
on a rocky ridge in Geumho-dong.
He gazes across the river
at the newly erected apartments in Apgujeong-dong.
Talking nonsense is his job.
Once evening comes,
the lights in the apartments across the river shine bright.
He gazes across at those lights.
He tries to rise,
but his legs have grown stiff, so he has to sit down again
on rocks that have neither blood
nor tears.
An out-of-season mosquito whines
but it has no strength to bite
and he has no blood to suck.
The two of them are in the same state,
Kim of Geumho-dong and the mosquito.
However,
Kim’s son
has the best shoulders in Geumho-dong,
a young tough who gives petty thieves a hard time.
Nothing like his father. Nothing.
He was first to be given a posthumous name, Jijeung.
He was first to be given the title
Wang
(King)
instead of
Maripgan
.
Jicheollo, the 22nd king of Silla,
had Kim as his family name;
his given name was Jidaero or Jidoro.
This king’s prick was said to be well over one foot long.
Unmarried,
he sent agents all over the country
to find him a wife.
At the foot of an old tree in Muryangbu
two dogs
were fighting and biting each other
over a gigantic turd the size of a big drum.
The agents wanted to know whose it was.
They discovered that one village girl
had produced it in the woods
while doing the washing.
As might be expected, that girl was over seven feet high.
She became the wife
of the bachelor king,
a heaven-sent spouse.
The candle was never put out
night after night.
They had two sons
and son Beopheung inherited the throne.
King Beopheung
and his queen both became monks.
A broad-minded fellow
travelling through Manchuria during Japanese rule,
one day he heard the Diamond Sutra being chanted
and became a monk.
Forming an association with other monks,
such as Cheongdam, Seongcheol, Hyanggok,
he sat in the full lotus position
in Bongam-sa temple in Mungyeong,
not lying down to sleep.
With his tall stature he played a major role
in founding the Jogye Order,
then he withdrew into the mountains.
No brilliant poems,
no dazzling sermons.
He simply sat unspeaking, keeping his mind focused,
inside the sound of the wind among Mount Toham’s pines,
yesterday,
today,
tomorrow.
Sat upright,
back sheerer than a cliff,
stunning.
Everything was in decline.
All the lights were going out,
no way things could be put right.
So King Gyeongmyeong in the last stages of Silla
had nothing to do but sit and drink.
Earlier, a dog in a wall painting in the Temple of the Four Heavenly Kings barked.
Monks recited sutras
but again it barked.
Then the bow-strings of the five guardians in the temple snapped.
The dog jumped out of the wall painting, barked,
jumped back into the painting.
The seven years of King Gyeongmyeong,
the three years of King Gyeongae
were years of collapse and nothing else.
King Gyeongmyeong asked, Am I a king or a scarecrow?
Drunk,
he took off his heavy crown
and gaped at Mount Namsan in the distance,
which came into sight then disappeared
At night his only care was for one lady of the court, a newcomer.
Among the eighteen sons of King Sejong the Great of the Joseon era,
the fifth, Prince Gwangpyeong,
like his father
mastered the Chinese classics by fifteen,
music and mathematics, too,
but died at the age of twenty.
The son he had fathered likewise died young.
Yi Won-hu, the sixth generation descendant of Prince Gwangpyeong,
married at fifteen,
and in addition to his wife,
so also his mother-in-law,
his grandmother-in-law,
great-grandmother-in-law were all widowed young.
Those widows worshipped spirits:
the spirit of the ground outside in the backyard,
the home’s guardian spirit inside the house,
Old Granny the kitchen spirit,
the spirit of the outdoor privy,
the Jade Emperor of Heaven and the King of the Underworld in the men’s quarters.
Spirits everywhere:
The Jade Emperor of Heaven,
The Granny spirit of childbirth,
The Mountain Spirit,
The Farming Spirit,
Wonsa spirits of Wishes,
Joseong Daegam spirits of buildings,
Jeseok spirits of Indra,
Songaksi spirits bringing disaster,
Mimyeong spirits of clothing,
spirits everywhere…
King Sejo of the Joseon era left behind six dead ministers,
and six living ministers.
Kim Si-seup,
one of the living,
became a mendicant monk
wandering the countryside.
Yi Maeng-jeon,
another of the living ministers,
went back home to Seosan, South Chungcheong,
and pretended to be blind,
spending the rest of his life like that,
thirty years,
with a blind man’s staff.
Then there was Cheong Rong who pretended to be deaf.
Gwon Jeol too,
after Sejo’s bloody coup,
pretended to be deaf.
He even used signs to communicate with his family.
Nam Hyo-on
and his son Nam Chung-seo
pretended to be insane.
If the weather was bad, they laughed:
hee hee hee
.
Even before the weather grew bad they would smack their lips:
hee hee hee
.
When swallows perched on the washing-line,
laughing
hee hee hee
, they sipped wine.
The man with ten eyes,
with twelve eyes –
when the moon rises
he looks up at the moon,
at the stars…
He looks up at this star
and that,
even the darkness between the stars.
He can never focus on any one thing,
O Gil-hwan
with his yellowish eyes.
If someone asks:
Hey, Gil-hwan, what did you see last night?
Ummm, I saw everything,
saw everything,
so I don’t know what I saw.
Gangs of homeless beggars always had a leader, a
kkokji
.
Kkokji
had five values to maintain.
Above all,
the gang should not beg from
widows,
widowers,
homes that had lost parents early.
That was called Benevolence.
If a family that has been generous with food loses someone,
the gang should help carry the bier.
That was called Righteousness.
Gangs should not covet each other's territory.
That was called Trust.
If the
kkokji
died
the gang should observe three years of mourning.
That was called Decorum.
The last was called Sense of Shame:
feeling shame at the sun setting in the west
when they stop being beggars and close their eyes.
In the late Joseon period,
the very last, rotten years of Joseon,
it was a poignant task
to rule the world as the beggars did.
So, was putrefying Joseon
destroyed by the Japanese?
Ninety percent of the work was done before they arrived.
That prison’s white wall was so high
that no matter how good you were at flying leaps
or running leaps
or jumping
with a wet blanket
spread wide,
it was absolutely absurd to hope to vault over it.
Twin guards,
Yi Gi-yeol and Yi Gi-sun,
Gi-sun with a birthmark,
spent long years inside that wall
working three shifts,
sometimes only two.
Inside that wall from their 20s through to their late 40s,
surely they were lifers too.
All those years, the older twin, Gi-yeol, beat convicts,
while the younger, Gi-sun,
snatched noodles the convicts had bought.
On each anniversary of their father’s early death,
one twin would be on night duty,
the rites attended by his wife and kids alone.
Apart from that anniversary,
Gi-sun stayed in prison most of the time,
but somehow he had three daughters and
two sons, one already lost
in a traffic accident.
Outside Yongin town, in Yongin county, Gyeonggi province,
runs a powerful range of mountains
and there, in the valley below the tomb of Jeong Mong-ju,
spring had never a thought of coming.
In Seoul,
and along the banks of the Hantan River above Seoul
the forsythia was already in full bloom
Yongin, however, often known as ‘Posthumous Yongin’,
was always ‘Late Yongin’.
The cold spring winds
had an icy edge.
The loudspeakers of the New Village Movement
pestered the village of Mansuteo
from early morning,
while just two people,
Jin Su-mun and his wife Gang Hye-ja,
exhausted
after making love that morning,
slept on,
shhh
shhh
,
stretched out with bare stomachs,
though the sun was high in the sky.
Then Jin Su-Mun was bitten by a centipede.
Damn it!
It bit me in the privates.
Damn it!
Damn it!
Notorious as a couple of idlers,
they had never received a New Village loan,
yet they were carefree and could always be heard shouting,
Damn it!
On the grounds of Buseok-sa temple in Yeongju, Sobaek Mountain,
there is a tree that grew
from a walking stick
planted by the great monk Uisang.
In Songgwang-sa temple in Suncheon, South Jeolla,
there is a tree that grew
from a walking stick
planted by the deeply revered monk Bojo, of the Goryeo dynasty.
The trees have lived long lives,
two thousand years,
one thousand years.
Nearer us, there’s a maple tree on Jungdae peak of Odae-san
that grew from a stick the Venerable Hanam
rested on
then planted.
It put out leaves and branches,
the leaves turning red in autumn.
One poet during the Yushin period in the 1970s,
sat beneath such walking stick trees
on Odae-san’s Jungdae
and in Jogye Mountain’s Songgwang-sa temple
while confined there by the intelligence agency.
Before him sat the elderly police detective, his keeper,
who said: ‘Well, thanks to you
I’m enjoying life as a mountain hermit,
the cicadas singing by day,
the Scops owl by night.’
Replied the poet:
‘Hey, since you walk about
with a stick,
you should plant it when you leave.
Who knows?’