창작과 비평

 

* Conference on ‘The Poetic World of Ko Un' / 8 May 2003 / Stockholm University, Sweden

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Shim-chong is the protagonist of a very famous Korean classical romance. The story was also made into an opera by Yi-sang Yoon for the opening ceremony of the Munich Olympics in 1972. Ko Un's poem presents the tragic scene where Shim-chong throws herself into the Indang Sea. She had sold herself to merchants from Nanjing to be a sacrificial offering intended to ensure a safe sea journey, in hope of facilitating by the money received the recovery of her blind father's sight. In the poem, the poet becomes the father and encourages his daughter to throw herself into the water. The poet rejects the traditional interpretation of the story in which Shim-chong's filial love is highly praised; he chose instead to evoke the tragic lot of the father whose life becomes a punishment for selling his daughter. The unique space where anti-traditional Modernism and anti-western Traditionalism meet is where the potery of Ko Un originates.

 

The Period of Popular Poetry

 

Ko Un joined the democratic movement against the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee in 1973. The following year, he came to the forefront of the national literature movement as he organized the Council of Writers for Practice of Freedom with Baek Nak-cheong. The national literature movement took the 1960 April Revolution that brought down the Syngman Rhee regime as the source of its imaginative power and of its protest againt Park Chung-hee's regime. As an military general, Park Chung-hee had led the 1961 coup that destroyed the newly born republic.

 

Why did they focus their new literary movement on the construction of national literature? In the 1960s, a literature of Engagement had already been proposed. It was conceived as a challenge to so-called 'pure' literature. The "pure literature" theory which was developed soon after Independence and survived the Korean War was actually very political, since it was adopted as the official literary ideology by the Syngman Rhee regime. Its influence seemed to diminish after the 1960 Revolution, but it was revived again after the 1961 coup. The literary theory of Engagement, which emerged from the call for democracy and was aware of the agony of the masses of the Korean people in their severed nation, challenged the pure literature theory, which attempted to deny the significance of the Revolution, and contributed to a speedy recovery of the social consciousness of Korean literature. Engagement developed into national literature movement based on the need for the construction of a new nation transcending the dichotomy of the capitalism of the south and the socialism of the north.

 

In this socio-political turmoil, a popular poetry of resistance which attempted to deconstruct the marriage between the traditional Group and modernists arose.
The appearance of Kim Ji-ha was highly significant. Ko Un joined the young group without hesitation. Having already returned to secular life, abandoning all he had achieved as a Buddhist monk, he threw himself-like Sim-chung-into the sea of the radical poetry of the 1970s. There the great resistance poem 'arrows' was born.

 

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!