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Variations: Three Korean Poets by Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nim and Lee Si-Young, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Kim Young-Moo. Cornell East Asia Series, 110. Ithaca: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2001 (bilingual edition). 328 pp. (ISBN 1-885445-10-5, paper, $19.00).
Reviewed by Sehjae Chun
SUNY/Buffalo[The reviewer wishes to express his warmest tribute to the memory of Kim Young-Moo, who passed away on Novemember 26, 2001]
Variations: Three Korean Poets is a welcome and intriguing bilingual collection of poems by Kim Su-Young (1921-1968), Shin Kyong-Nim (1935- ) and Lee Si-Young (1949- ). It consists of an introduction by Yoon Ji-Kwan, a helpful "Historical Note" providing an outline of key events in twentieth-century Korea, and the original text of a number of poems by Kim, Shin and Lee together with a facing translation. At first glance, readers may be surprised by the combination of three poets who were born fourteen years apart and who have formed their peculiar poetic spheres individually. Moreover, the choice of Lee Si-Young, a relatively less-well known figure, rather than, say, Kim Chi-Ha or Ko Un may also raise eyebrows.
To waylay uneasiness about this combination, Yoon Ji-Kwan in his introduction points out "a common voice" among these poets arising "in the form of a strong moral echo" (xi). Similarly, Brother Anthony, who co-translated the three poets' works with Kim Young-Moo, notes that "the idea of bringing their work together in a single volume originated with my co-translator, Professor Kim Young-Moo" who understands that "they share a common concern -- the need for poetry to speak with the vividness of a living voice. Their poems reflect in varying ways the lives of ordinary people at critical moments in modern Korean history." [1] As early as 1982, Kim Young-Moo had already mapped out the genealogy of the steady and distinctive voices and currents in modern Korean poetry that were initiated by Han Yong-Woon and Lee Yook-Sa, propelled by Kim Su-Young and Shin Dong-Yeop and given further momentum by Shin Kyong-Nim, Chong Hee-Sung and Ha Jong-Ho. [2] Lee Si-Young, though not included in the tradition Kim charted earlier, has actively published poems that display the natural environment and the commonplace routines of human experience with vividness, beginning with his second poetry collection Into the Wind (1986). According to Kim Young-Moo, Lee Si-Young echoes the common voice of Kim Su-Young and Shin Kyong-Nim and, in this light, we can regard him as a contemporary deserving literary inheritor.
The title of this volume, Variations, comes from Kim Su-Young's "Variations on the Theme of Love" and suggests how "the vividness of a living voice" varies in each poet's works. The first variation on the theme played by Kim Su-Young is best understood historically. Amidst the literary environment of the 50s and 60s, which was often alienating in its brittle displays of languishing sentiment, its extreme privacy, and its use of rhetoric to avoid self-absorption as well as irony, Kim Su-Young's poems stood out. His poems reveal many different faces to readers and they reveal the mutually interlocking relationship among avant-garde experiment, freedom, love and conscience.
Although Kim Su-Young could be considered a traditionalist in his concern for scrupulous attention to artistic craft, he does not organize his poems according to pre-established conventions of rhyme, meter and stanzaic patterns, which would limit the reader's experience of the poem to a small set of received meanings. On the contrary, he writes in a highly aestheticizing vein and often compels his readers to discover distinct and particular meanings as they work through the unpredictable poetic tensions found in "Games in the Land of the Moon" and "A Gladiolus."
His later poems, however, are more accessible and have much to share with readers in their efforts to bridge the gap between art and life. In this vein he privileges the idea of the artist who is doomed to struggle against those who oppose freedom, intelligence and humanism, as articulated in his essays "Poetry, Spit It Out" (1968) and "Theory of Anti-Poetics" (1968). Rejecting the artistically crafted and lofty image of the artist celebrated in the poetry of So Chong-Ju (1915-2000), Kim Su-Young believes, on the contrary, that the artist must immerse himself in history and the ordinariness of life. Kim respects no boundaries between art and life and, furthermore, makes the transgression of boundaries a centerpiece of his poetry by embracing the undisguised encounter with ordinary life and freedom from the aristocratic use of language, as exemplified in "First Tear Down His Photo," "A Prayer," and "Colossal Roots" among others.
More importantly, Kim Su-Young's poems capture the changes in people's sensibility before and after the 4.19 Revolution and extend beyond the self-reflective internalized sense of reality of the complacent bourgeois to offer a strong sense of social responsibility. For example, Kim discovers grass as a poetic theme in "Grass," and observes that "The grass is lying flat. / It lies flat more quickly than the wind. / It weeps more quickly than the wind. / It rises more quickly than the wind" (121). Similar to Kim So-Wol's adoption of the azalea in his poetry, Kim Su-Young selects grass, an ordinary and even worthless object that is not deemed appropriate in poetry, and reads the undying spirit of the people within it.
Unlike Kim Su-Young, who experienced revolutionary changes in poetic vision after the 4.19 Revolution and the 5.16 Military Coup, Shin Kyong-Nim, as a people's poet, has maintained and deepened his earlier enthusiasm for the minjung and the locality of the present. While Kim Su-Young counts on his individual experience to expose the fallacy of the society around him, Shin Kyong-Nim attempts to minimize his private emotional response and to evoke a collective response by immersing his personal voice in the loud and bitter suffering of the minjung. However, readers discover in his poems the conviction that the private meditation of the poet and the life of the minjung resonate within each other, each clarifying, defining, challenging and enriching the other to give birth to the communal "we" voice Brother Anthony aptly noted. [3]
Shin's role as gadfly to politically neutral intellectuals in situations of political upheavals is important in modern Korean poetry, as is his role as an important activist-writer whose response in words and actions to the urgent needs of our society is vital. Considering that the industrialization precipitated by the 5. 16 Military Coup expanded at the steady sacrifice of rural communities, the poems "I Felt Ashamed, Little Sisters" and "A Dog-rose" reflect his deeply rooted sense of the reality of the minjung.
In the face of widespread industrialization, Shin's frequent recourse to residual rural communities is not that of a defeatist or of an escapist. Rather, beyond the perspective of the sentimental spectator, he turns himself into an active participant in the daily lives of the minjung, and his poems are an effort to comprehend and represent the political disorders that threaten to overwhelm human potential. He discovers and realizes that the voice of the powerless, the lonely and the poor is his own and he expresses historically defined emotion, will, resistance and hope on behalf both of the dispossessed and himself. In "May's Lessons" he affirms that "in the month of May, I learned the joys of revenge, / I learned the joy of stabbing as stabbed, of trampling as trampled, / then the month of May showed me the way to go" (179).
Unlike mere prosaic political protest disguised in poetic vocabulary, however, Shin's poems evince considerable aesthetic appeal as well. In order to offer powerful social observations and commentary without reducing experience to shrill propaganda, Shin actively appropriates indigenous vocabulary, colloquialisms, folk rhythm and image to best reflect the sentiments of the people. For instance, a series of poems about "Kut," a popular shaman ritual in Korea, best exemplifies Shin's tour de force in this volume. In "Ssitkim Kut," "The Voice," "Yollim Kut Song," and "For a Hojaebi Kut," Shin succeeds in finding the appropriate indigenous poetic form to poetically capture the spirit of the people in the chanting of the shaman who vocalizes the honest wish of the minjung. A wandering spirit of the minjung in "Ssitkim Kut" pronounces: "I cannot go with my broken neck and severed limb, / I cannot quietly close my blood-blinded eyes, / cannot seize hold, cannot seize with this severed hand, I cannot seize your blood-covered hands. / I have come back, blood-blinded eyes glaring, I have returned / with my broken neck, hugging severed limbs; / I grind my teeth and wish bitter frost may drop from heaven" (151).
These are stupendous poems that not only show the suffering of the minjung under the military dictatorship but reflect its uncompromising spirit and its refusal to reconcile with the oppressors. As such they offer solace to the spirits of those massacred in the Kwangju Uprising and other tragic events.
A vivid living voice, planted by Kim Su-Young and nurtured by Shin Kyong-Nim comes to fruition in the form of Lee Si-yong's new lyricism. In the bleakest times of political turmoil and unrest, which culminated in the military dictatorship and the Kwangju Uprising, lyricism seemed not only impossible, but even blasphemy. As in Shin Kyong-Nim's poems, seemingly ordinary country landscapes turn into historically charged moral backdrops in Lee Si-Young's poems. In "Chong-im," "A Letter," "About History," and "Birds," Lee adopts an analysis of natural landscape reminiscent of Raymond Williams, which suggests the dismantling of the agricultural community and the subsequent alienation of people from nature.
Lee's more recent and fairly short nature poems collected in this volume, however, show a change in approach. While in his earlier work the consciousness in nature might take purely self-referential forms, here nature, as observed by the poet, is seen from a holistic perspective quite rare in modern Korean poetry. Consider particularly "At Dawn" in which he exclaims that "Why, the insects rose early / and set about coloring one portion of the universe blue!" (299) or "Perilous Dwelling" in which he describes how "A few sparrows perch on an insignificant branch, / at which the tree bends, then rightens the cosmic balance again" (299)
Lee's turn to a holistic view of nature reflects not a desire to escape from awkward political and personal responsibilities but a renewed affirmation of the intrinsic wholeness of the natural world. In other words, his increasing interest in marginal animals, extending to insects and worms becomes the logical extension of his earlier interests in the victimization of the powerless, and resonates with the variations on the theme of love played by Kim Su-Young and Shin Kyong-Nim.
Lee's location of the agency of his own thoughts outside of himself shows his realization that humans are but one humble part of nature. In other words, Lee, both impassioned and scrupulously controlled, neither simply exploring nor eschewing the self, but uncovering and making known the relationship of the self to nature, offers a biocentric model of experience that goes beyond the anthropocentric one.
Precisely by using his eyes, ears and shaping imagination to achieve an authentic perception of the immediate experience, he, "with big dangling ears," listens to "the crash of a rock being smashed" ("A New Dawn" 281) and suggests the interdependence between humans and nature. In other words he seems to "think like mountains," in the phrase of Aldo Leopold, one of the forerunners of modern environmental movements. Therefore in "On a Cape" he confirms that "for that one star to shine like a flower, / the blood of a host of little stars was shed. / For that one grain of sand to come to land in enormous silence, a host of other waves lay gasping becalmed" (261).
Variations is a delightful challenge to our understanding of modern Korean poetry. Indeed, Variations, a unique collection of poems by Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nim and Lee Si-Young, takes us on a winding journey among variations on the themes of love in modern Korean poetry--love of the ordinary in Kim Su-Young, love of the minjung in Shin Kyong-Nim and love of nature in its unity in Lee Si-Young. Some will no doubt find the challenging combination of these three poets very welcoming. Others may require more scholarly attention for an understanding of the complexity unveiled here. Nonetheless, by listening carefully to the variations played by these poets, all may come to hear the different protean modes in which they compose.
Notes
[1] Brother Anthony of Taizé. "Words That Span Generations" Korea Times. 2001/11/04 (http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/kt_culture/200111/t2001110417395546110.htm)
[2] Kim Young-Moo. "Two Layered Perspectives in Poetry" in _World Literature_(Seagye-eu-Moonhak) 1982, Spring.
[3] Brother Anthony of Taizé. "The Poetry of Shin Kyong-Nim" (http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony/ShinArticle.htm)
Citation:
Chun, Sehjae 2002
Review of Variations: Three Korean Poets by Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nim and Lee Si-Young, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Kim Young-Moo. (2002)
Korean Studies Review 2002, no. 13
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr02-13.htm
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