창작과 비평

 

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

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From this angle it would not be difficult to move on to poems with a more discernible social content like “South and North” and “Asking the Way” in the same volume, [7] then to others not designated as Zen poetry but successfully combining Zen-ness and realism.

 

But what about the much longer and often more overtly realistic Ten Thousand Lives ?

 

The word maninbo in Korean means ‘biographies of ten thousand people' but manin can also mean ‘all the people'. The proclaimed intent of the work is to record in poetry every person that the poet has ever known, and when Ko Un announced at the outset that, accepting his wife's restraining advice, he had agreed to limit his goal to three thousand pieces rather than actual ten thousand, it still sounded fantastic enough. But the series now numbers fifteen volumes (published between 1986 and 1997) with some seventeen hundred individual poemsㅡto which the author promises to add within this year about five hundred and fifty more poems in five volumes.

 

Ko Un has been performing the task with such ease and amplitude that one tends to overlook the extraordinary nature of the project. Indeed, the very conception was a stroke of genius, involving a rare capacity for dedication and hope that only genius can supply. For it was in the days following the Kwangju Massacre of 1980 when Ko Un had been once again arrested and put in solitary confinement in a military prison that he conceived the idea and pledged himself (if he were ever to see light and freedom) to that task. (“The project itself, just the idea of it,” observed Robert Haas, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, “should be enough to put him on the short list for the Nobel Prize.” [8] )

 

But in Ten Thousand Lives the poet also has hit upon a genre and form most congenial to his particular talents. For while Ko Un has large ambitions, even preoccupations, for the epic genres and written a number of long narrative poems and full-length novels, I personally believe his greatest strength lies in the shorter verse form. The extended cycle of short poetic sketches that constitutes Ten Thousand Lives thus seems to provide a happy field for that particular strength to combine with his epic impulses.

 

The result already represents a rich and variegated gallery of numerous individuals the poet has known since childhood, an achievement certainly unique in Korean literature and probably in other literatures as well. But the point I wish to make is that the series manages to become such because time and again we encounter poems that convey the same flash of insight as in the Zen poems, and the same sympathy with common people and no-nonsense realism that the poet's demotic conception of Zen entails.

 

Eighteen of these poems are available in English in the selection The Sound of My Waves . [9] Far from a representative selection, to be sure; but here (almost at random) is one of them, titled “Pyongok”:

 

If you're born a yokel out in the backwoods,
once you've reached five or six
there's no time left for play,
you're forced to become a drudge
following your father,
with work piling up like the hills.
When autumn comes,
If mother tells you to bring home mud-snails
you go rushing out to the rice-paddy:
foraging for snails half a day
in the wide open spaces out there
is great, really great.
Being away from his rotten jobs is great.
Pyongok,
expert snail-catcher Pyongok,
drank lye by mistake and died.
None of the neighborhood kids knew
where he was buried.
If a kid dies there's no tomb, no offerings,
there'll be another one born by-and-by. ( The Sound of My Waves , 90)

 

In a way we have here a tragic story with a background of much hardship and misery, but the poem moves us by its combination of dispassionate report and muted celebrationㅡcelebration of joys even in that apparently wasted life, and of a greater life going on. And without disparaging the translators' generally admirable work, I wish to add that the original ends with a much greater impact.

 

아이들 죽어야 무덤도 없다 제사도 없다 또 낳는다

 

A single line, rather than the two of the English version; and the final two words “또 낳는다” constitute a full sentence on its own, indicating that they (meaning these people, but Korean does without either the noun or pronoun) will bear (children) againㅡthat is, using an active verb (rather than the extended passive form “there'll be another one born” plus the redundant “by-and-by”) and making utmost use of the language's resources for ellipsis and compression to produce the hard-boiled, matter-of-fact tone. [10]

 

I have brought with me both The Sound of My Waves volume and new translations in typescript of twenty-six more poems from Ten Thousand Lives , which the translators of a newly projected volume of Ko Un's selected poetry (Brother Anthony, the late Young-Moo Kim and Gary Gach) have kindly made available to me. But since even to read them all would give only a small indication of that stupendous work, I will stop here and come back to some of them if called for during general discussion. I have also included some additional remarks in the appendixes, to bring in as the time limit allows.

 

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[7] See Appendix I.
[8] Robert Haas, “On Korean Poetry and Ko Un” (introductory speech at Ko Un's poetry reading on November 24, 1997, at University of California, Berkeley), Korean Culture Vol. 20 No. 1, Spring 1999 (Korean Cultural Center of the Korean Consulate General in Los Angeles, USA), p. 13. Also see Appendix II.
[9] The Sound of My Waves: Selected Poems by Ko Un , translated by Brother Anthony of Taize and Young-Moo Kim, Cornell East Asia Series, Cornell University, Ithaca NY, 1993.
[10] All in all the original has fifteen lines to the twenty in English, and its last two lines are rendered by four lines in the translation. See “병옥이” in 고은 <만인보> vol. 3, p. 20 (Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 1986).