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<div><font color="#000000">_Sending the Ship Out to the Stars:
Poems of Park Je-chun_, by Park Je-chun, trans. Ko Chang Soo, 1997.
Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series no. 88. 100 pp.
(ISBN 1-8854-4558-X).<br>
<br>
Reviewed by Scott Swaner<br>
University of Washington</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">swaner@u.washington.edu<u><br>
<br>
</u><x-tab> </x-tab>In the translator's introduction to<i> Sending the
Ship Out to the Stars: Poems of Park Je-chun</i>, Ko Chang Soo
describes Park Je-chun (Pak Che-ch'ôn, b. 1945) as a
"spiritualist poet [who] shows himself to be well rooted in
everyday reality" (xi). The description seems strategically
intended to place the poet somewhere other than within the
traditional, and too often strict, categorization of poets since the
1950s as either "pure" or socially "engaged."
Ko's description aims at transcendence, an attempt uncannily
recognized in the poet's work as well. In fact, Ko invokes the
term "spiritualist" to suggest just one sub-group among all
of the traditionally oriented poetic voices of modern Korea, those
with which he contrasts the voices of the so-called experimentalists
and politically oriented poets. Achieved through a style that
draws simultaneously on melodic and prosaic elements, Park's unique
voice inquires into universal philosophical (predominantly
existential) questions, all the while remaining rooted in local
tradition and culture. Park's poetic projects include: (1)
explorations of language that hovers between prosaic form and lyric
melody; (2) attempts to ground poetry's imaginative power in the
Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Taoism; and (3) efforts to confront
historical reality with poetic transcendence (Kwôn Yôngmin,<i>
Han'guk hyôndae munhaksa</i> 268-269). All these projects are
represented in<i> Sending the Ship</i>, which is made up of selections
from several of Park's books.<br>
<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Among other themes suggested by the
title of this collection is the metapoetic. The thematized act of
writing, a characteristic that inheres in all poetry to some extent,
features prominently in Park's work and specifically highlights his
sensitive engagement with language. For the poet, his poems are
like "little ships" sent out to the readers' universe of
stars and space. For example, in "Recent Status" we
read, "Each night I send off several newly built ships. / My
little ships which become full / with only loads of waterlight and
moonlight . . ." (69). A diligent shipwright, the poet
works to build these little ships, sends them off, and waits, but
throughout his poetry and this collection he seems to wait in vain.
Such waiting points to the paradoxical if not dialectical side of his,
otherwise generally acknowledged, transcendent tendencies. An
existential cloud of emptiness, questioning, and simply waiting hangs
over his poems. Thus his attempts to peer into the "vacant
sky"-a recurrent trope in this book-of existence provide the
reader with insight into the potential purpose of not only life but
poetry as well. Readers may refer to Park's 1997 book<i> Si
rûl ôttôhk'e koch'il kôt in'ga</i> (How to fix poetry?) for a
more explicit authorial exposition on the writing, working, and
meaning of poetry.<br>
<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Concerning the poet's sending and waiting,
that is, his quest for answers and his concurrent quest to stop caring
about those answers, the poems in this book repeatedly suggest a
terrestrial overcoming (or<i> ch'ogûk</i>) sought through nihility
or non-existence. For example, "Void No. 4" reads:
"The voices of insects leap into the empty sky. / . . . / Why do
you and I exist in the heaven and earth / full of those insect voices?
/ Are you and I utterly futile?" (81). Park's poems marshal
the imagery of objects in order to explore Buddhistic themes of human
transience and karma, and Taoist themes of peaceful acceptance of
one's cosmic place in a life lacking meaning -- in other words, of
being-in-itself. And yet despite the existential(ist) overtones
pervading his poetry, it would be inaccurate to read these moments as
nihilistic complaints rather than liberatory endeavors carried out
through a poetry concerned with the objects we experience here and
now: "It is simply that I abandon the futile shadow / in
order to jump over the fence of this mind" (59).
Enlightened transcendence through the mundane and the banal: we get
the feeling Park wants to write his way through the particular in
order to reach the universal. In the poet's words, "A world
waits for me, / a world in a drop of water" (55).</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>And yet,
despite the way Park's poetic gaze hovers around the particular (the
material object), a profound sense of unworldliness pervades this
collection. Striking is the absence of nearly anything we can
identify as "modern" or "urban" in these poems
written in the last three decades. One feels Park's existence is
rather like a contemporary gentleman-scholar in exile, a modern-day
Yun Sôndo. His poems, accordingly, are possessed of near
complete timelessness. One poem is written to Baudelaire (80),
another mentions a supermarket (76), "barbwire" appears
twice (64, 66), and we also encounter one photograph (61), a postage
stamp (50), Apollinaire and a pipe-organ (45). While objects
feature prominently in Park's work, it is not modern items or figures
so much as the rustic, traditional, and folk--a pre-industrialized
world filled with birds, trees, mountains, clouds, rain. In one
especially well-rendered phrase, the speaker seeks, hears, and writes
of "the applause of shapeless things" (49). Park works
on his little ships, not in cities, but in temples, villages, fields,
mountains, and the empty skies. In this sense, he well
represents poetry of the so-called pure school. In the poem
entitled "No. 1," the speaker evokes the spiritual realm
through natural imagery, alludes to a temple bell through the image of
its fish-shaped striker, and then, after hanging a "desolate
painting on a temple gate," he stops to think and a question
comes to mind. Rather than ask with Yi Sanghwa, "Does
spring return to stolen fields?", Park poses a more fundamental,
spiritual, and nearly ontological, as opposed to legalistic, question
-- as we picture the speaker gazing about himself, then wondering
aloud -- "Whose land is this anyway?" (53).<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Given the
persisting dearth of modern poetry translations, not to mention
competently (let alone skillfully) translated Korean poetry,<i>
Sending the Ship</i> is a welcome addition. What is more, even
though Park is widely anthologized in Korea, this volume brings us a
less commonly heard poetic voice that maintains itself despite
variegated translation quality. A number of these poems have
previously appeared in US literary journals and these previously
published translations stand out as the most poetic, highest quality
pieces in this collection. That said, a number of the
translations might well benefit from some revision, perhaps in a
second edition. Overall, this book serves as a reminder to all
of us who translate that, in the words of the poet Giacamo Leopardi,
"a translation is perfect when the author translated is not, for
example, Greek in Italian, or Greek or French in German, but<i> the
same</i> in Italian or German<i> as</i> he is in Greek or
French." Nevertheless, to cite one of the brightest ships
Park sends out to the stars, we hope the poems will endure as "A
flame I make and then send away / flickers like starlight"
(60).<br>
<br>
<x-tab>
</x-tab> <br
>
Citation:<br>
Swaner, Scott 2004</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">_Sending the Ship Out to the Stars:
Poems of Park Je-chun_, by Park Je-chun, trans. Ko Chang Soo
(1997)</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">_Korean Studies Review_ 2004, no. 12<br>
Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr04-12.htm</font></div>
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