[KS] KSR 1999-01:_The Snow Falling on Chagall's Village: Selected

[Stephen Epstein]

_The Snow Falling on Chagall's Village: Selected Poems by Kim Ch'un-Su_, by
Kim Ch'un-Su (trans. Kim Jong-Gil). Cornell East Asia Series, 93. Ithaca,
NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998. (ISBN 1-885445-53-9 cloth;
ISBN 1-885445-93-8 paper).

             Reviewed by Theodore Hughes
         University of California, Los Angeles


The Hanguk Ilbo recently (5 January 1999) asked a group of 100 well-known
poets, novelists and literary critics to choose ten poets and ten poems
from the 20th century which would remain as classics in the 21st century. A
glimpse of the contemporary importance ascribed to Kim Ch'un-Su [Kim
Ch'unsu (1922- )] is revealed by the fact that he was selected as the ninth
poet (tied with Ko Un) on the list. In addition, his "Kkot" (Flower) was
ranked ninth on the list of poems. While critical of Kim Ch'un-Su's "desire
for compromise over struggle, tranquillity over suffering, faith over
inquiry," Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyôn nevertheless acknowledged as early as
1973 that "along with Sô Chôngju and Kim Suyông, he has exerted the
strongest influence on poetry in the post-liberation period. The vast
majority of poems known as poems of being [chonjae ûi si] or poems
investigating interiority [naemyôn t'amgu ûi si] owe an enormous debt to
Kim Ch'un-Su's poetic explorations."

_The Snow Falling on Chagall's Village_ contains a selection of translated
poems (arranged in chronological order, but with no dates) spanning Kim
Ch'un-Su's long and prolific career, from his first volume of poetry, The
Cloud and the Rose (1948) to his latest, The Woods that Sleep Standing
(1993). Kim Jong-Gil [Kim Chonggil] tell us that his selection was aimed at
providing poems which were "the best and most communicable in the entire
poetic corpus of Kim Ch'un-Su" (viii). The collection of translations,
which includes such well-known poems as "Flag," "Flower," "Prologue for a
Flower," "The Bare Tree and Poetry," selections from "Fragments on Ch'oyong
[Ch'ôyong]," as well as later works such as "Goya's Scream," "Scenes on the
Acropolis" and "A Red Dragonfly," performs this task admirably, allowing
the reader to trace the many transformations of a poet known for an
unceasing ability to reinvent his poetic project.

Yi Sûnghun has distinguished five separate stages in Kim Ch'un-Su's poetry.
The first (dating from his literary debut in 1948 to the late 1950s) is
marked by an ontological exploration, in particular an investigation of the
relationship between being and language, of the ways in which phenomena
cannot exist separately from the act of naming. The second period (late
1950s to the mid-1960s) focuses on the development of the notion of
"descriptive imagery," the invocation of an image not as a means to convey
ideas, but in order to elicit another image. In this "world of images
existing for the sake of images" it is the "images themselves which become
objects." The third period (mid-1960s to the mid-1970s) is described as a
"post-imagist" phase. Images are no longer linked to each other in terms of
reference, but instead are characterized by their own effacement. An image
comes into play by dismembering another image, an act which foretells its
own eradication at the hands of a third image. The fourth period (mid-1970s
to the early 1980s) witnesses a turn to reflections on the nature of
religion and art. The fifth period (early 1980s to the present) is informed
by the elaboration of a sense of "resignation and humor."

Kim Jong-Gil states that he has pursued a "policy of attempting maximum
fidelity to both the text and the poetry" (viii). In _The Snow Falling on
Chagall's Village_, Kim has indeed succeeded in maintaining a delicate
balance between readability and faithfulness to the original. It is a
careful, well-crafted translation. If one were pressed to find fault
somewhere, however, a very small issue to raise would be the matter of
punctuation in several of the poems in the collection ("Flag," "Fountain"
and "Prologue for a Flower").  Kim Ch'un-Su often makes use of a comma to
conclude his poems, or, more accurately, to point to a certain
inconclusiveness. The translator has chosen to elide this usage.

In his introduction, Kim Jong-Gil describes Kim Ch'un-Su as "an avowed
purist and experimentalist" (2). Indeed, Kim Ch'un-Su's association with
the "pure literature" (sunsu munhak) camp has engendered much criticism of
his work, including a less than generous psychoanalytic reading of his
texts by Kim Hyôn. Cho Namhyôn and others have pointed to the relations
between Kim Ch'un-Su's work and the poetry of Rilke, as well as that of
French symbolists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Valéry.  Study
of Kim Ch'un-Su's poetry, then, provides the opportunity both to address
the contested terrain of post-liberation Korean literary history and to
explore the discursive relations between the work of an innovative Korean
poet, one whose project seems to remain always necessarily incomplete, and
the texts of Western poets.

Kim Jong-Gil's translation, the winner of the Cornell East Asia Program
Yeonam Prize for "outstanding book-length Korean work," represents a
significant contribution to Korean studies. It should be a welcome addition
to Korean literature courses taught in English translation.


Citation:
Hughes, Theodore 1999
Review of _The Snow Falling on Chagall's Village: Selected Poems by Kim
Ch'un-Su_, trans. Kim Jong-Gil
Korean Studies Review 1999, no. 1
Electronic file:
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/korean-studies/files/ksr99-01.htm





























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