[KS] Kim Yeong-Nang

[Brother Anthony]

Not many people will have realized that 2010 marks (among many other things) the 60th anniversary of the death of the poet Kim Yeong-Nang, who spent moct of his life in Gangjin, South Jeolla Province. After successfully escaping the searches of the North Koreans during their occupation of Seoul, he was killed in the bombardent during their withdrawal at the end of September 1950, not yet fifty years old. His reputation as an anti-Japanese writer and as an innovative poet is currently growing in Korea, where he has tended to be overlooked for the first because he was only briefly in prison (in 1919)  and for the second because he died before the post-Liberation literary influences and cliques formed. He has for too long been admired (dismissed) as the poet of a single poem ("Until Peonies Bloom"). I have just published a bilingual edition with translations of all his poems, done at the request of his son, and I think I can announce the fact here since I do not stand to gain financially from any sales!

Until Peonies Bloom: The Complete Poems of Kim Yeong-Nang. Portland: MerwinAsia. 2010
ISBN 978-1-878282-98-9
See:    http://merwinasia.com/books/until_peonies_bloom.html 

In recent years, Gangjin has organized a Yeong-Nang Festival, with an annual Yeong-Nang Literary Award, which this year went to Kim Jiha.

Brother Anthony
Sogang University, Seoul
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/