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Sending the Ship Out to the Stars: Poems of Park Je-chun, by Park Je-chun, trans. Ko Chang Soo, 1997. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program no. 88. 100 pp. (ISBN 1-8854-4558-X).
Reviewed by Scott Swaner
University of WashingtonIn the translator's introduction to Sending the Ship Out to the Stars: Poems of Park Je-chun, 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, Han'guk hyôndae munhaksa 268-269). All these projects are represented in Sending the Ship, which is made up of selections from several of Park's books.
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 Si rûl ôttôhk'e koch'il kôt in'ga (How to fix poetry?) for a more explicit authorial exposition on the writing, working, and meaning of poetry.
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 ch'ogûk) 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).
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).
Given the persisting dearth of modern poetry translations, not to mention competently (let alone skillfully) translated Korean poetry, Sending the Ship 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 the same in Italian or German as 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).
Citation:
Swaner, Scott 2004
Review of Sending the Ship Out to the Stars: Poems of Park Je-chun, by Park Je-chun, trans. Ko Chang Soo (1997)
Korean Studies Review 2004, no. 12
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr04-12.htm