창작과 비평

 

 

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

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In this poem with its breathless tension, there is the lonely music of the death of revolutionary democrats who fought against the military dictatorship of Park Chung-hee. I fear a resonance of 'Ode to Sim-chong'. The speaker of the poem, who makes a lonely decision to confront death without hope of resurrection, without self-consciousness of sacrifice, but embracing fear, resembles Sim-chong about to throw herself into the sea. In this poem, the poet is not Shim-chong's father anymore; he becomes Shim-chong giving herself in sacrifice. The poem is no simple propaganda. The "let's" which dominates the whole poem is in fact directed to 'myself, not 'us'.

 

Beyond the Borders

 

The dictator-president Park Chung-hee was assassinated by one of his loyal followers on 26 October, 1979. Ko Un was in prison at that time and was released at the end of the year. He was imprisoned again as the new military regime took power after supressing the Kwangju Uprising and was only released in 1982. The following year he got married, and went to live in Ansong, two hours south of Seoul. His return to the world was now complete.

 

Two years after being released from prison, he published a book of poetry entitled Homeland Stars . Unexpectedly, the book was full of liveliness and lacked the solemn odor of death which had prevailed in the poetry of his middle period. What was the secret? "I know / that the noise of playing children / is more important than the shouts of struggle / I, who have been shouting for ten years, know that" (from 'March'). The realization that the shouts of struggle and the noise of playing children are two different sounds and yet the same shows that he can criticize his own poems which used to only consider the former. He criticises the poems of the middle period, poems which themselves were critical of the early period. This is where the new territory of the late period is shaped: it transcends the boundaries of the political and the poetic. "The world is meaningless/the world is true"--he transcends this dichotomy and approaches the Buddhist principle that "the meaningless is true and the true is meaningless". It is ironic that his Buddhist idea only became complete when his return to secular life was complete.

 

Korean poetry of the 1980s was marked with the sadness of the survivors and full of requiems for the dead, overloaded with guilt concerning the Kwangju Uprising. The young generation who had witnessed the Kwangju Uprising quickly engaged in the radical popular poetry movement. In June, 1987, protests against the military regime exploded. The poetry of the 1990's was distanced from the excessive social consciousness of the 1980s, faced with the new international and domestic political situation: the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the birth of democratic civilian government in Korea (1993). 'Little poems' were prevalent, accompanied by the collapse of 'the grand story'. There was also a tendency to pursue simultaneously 'a big poem' and 'a little poem,' repudiating the poems of the 1980s and the 1990s.

 

In such a poem as 'Tomorrow' (1992), Ko Un finds a way leading to life at the hiatus where the old is dead and the new is yet to come.

 

Tomorrow

Through the tough days of pain
tomorrow was my only verdant honor,
sole source of any strength I had left,
as I waved
a final farewell
at each waning day.
Was that real?
This? That?
That again?
If love and hate,
and the land of my father,
were only things of today
beneath the starlight fireworks
of countless nights past, then
let glasses stay empty,
offer no more toasts.

Tomorrow.
Isn't it a magnificent name!
Oh, ragged destiny -
though dazzling flesh
and dictatorship
may now be one,
see beyond affairs of today,
if such is today,
to where is already streaming
in the wind, without fanfare, like a lone child:

tomorrow!

 

The first stanza is about the past. It begins with retrospection. The past in this poem most probably refers to the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. In "the tough days of pain" when we had to grope for starlight, "tomorrow was my only verdant honor". In other words, in the absoluteness of a tomorrow which is yet to come-and the poet may die before it comes-the present is completely denied. However, there is a subtle change in the absoluteness of tomorrow in the second stanza. Tomorrow is here again praised as "a magnificent name" compared wiht the poor today where "dazzling flesh and dictatorship may now be one". However, paying attention to the resonance of "if" in "if such is today", it can be noticed that the consciousness of the poet has attained the dialectics of present and future. He embraces the dark "ragged destiny" and sumons a tomorrow that will come as a child mothered by today.

 

In the first stanza, time originates only from the future, whereas in the second stanza the present is brooding over the future like a hen over her eggs. Therefore, the poem is not the song of a prophet who appears in a wilderness in rags and urges people to sacrifice today for tomorrow. This is a kind of Son (Zen) poem where a paradoxical wisdom is present: the present, fully embraced, becomes tomorrow.

 

With such a sophisticated consciousness of time, Ko Un continuously crosses boundaries. He has crossed the boundary of the South by visiting the North. He wanders the world. He goes beyond the closed nationalism of many modern-day Koreans. Crossing all boundaries, he communicates with his own nation and the world, and he walks in the state of that Great Freedom where Transmigration becomes Emancipation. The poetic journey of Ko Un, who has accompanied the modern Korean history of suffering and hardship, has finally reached the state where he is heard by the whole world.

 

trans by Chung Soh-Young