[KS] Fw: Experience of Han

[양상군자]

This doesn't *directly* relate, but I ran across something interesting a while back.  It was from Douglas R. Hofstadter's _Metamagical Themas_, pp. 185-6.  He is writing about Chopin, but I find the _han_ parallel intriguing.

"The Poles are a people who have learned to distinguish sharply between two concepts of Poland:  Poland the abstract social entity, at whose core are the Polish language and culture, and Poland the concrete geographical entity, the land that the Poles live in.  Navro d polski--the "Polish Nation"--represents a spirit rather than a piece of territory, although of course the nation came into existence because of the bonds between people who lived in a certain region.  It is the fragility of this flickering flame, and the determination to keep it alive, that Chopin's music reflects so purely and poignantly.  There is a certain fusion of bitterness, anger and sadness called  zal [actually, that's a "z" with a dot over it] that is uniquely Polish.  One hears it, to be sure, in the famous mazurkas and polonaises, pieces that Chopin composed in the form of national dances. ... But one hears this burning flame of Poland just as much in many of Chopin's other pieces ... where a ray o!
 f hope bursts through dark visions like a gleam in the gloom.  One hears  zal in the angry, buzzing harmonies of the  Etude in C-sharp minor and the passion of the  Etude in E major.  In fact, Chopin is said to have cried out once, on hearing this piece played in his presence, "O ma patrie!" ("O my homeland!")

Surely this is as equivalent to Korean _han_ as one is ever likely to find, no?

Mike Miller




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