by Ko Un
I am a rightist.
I saw the reality of Pyongyang.
Tell everyone
that I am a rightist.
I curse what lies beyond the 38th parallel.
After Seoul was recaptured he was arrested as a traitor.
To save him, the writer Kim Dong-ni
visited the police and the prosecutors.
When Hong Sa-jun was imprisoned,
fearful, apprehensive,
he resolved to escape.
While attempting to escape he was killed. He was like a drop of dew.
If he had only held on a little longer,
he would have been released
after investigation.
His writing would have bloomed to the fullest.
After all, the poet No Cheon-myeong, who ran wild under the communists,
she was released.
Gwon Jin-gyu
His Japanese wife died.
Love lost.
Alone he moulded clay
chiseled stone.
The sculptor Gwon Jin-gyu
had a room in Donam-dong, Seoul.
The sculptures were quite at home.
The sculptor
was a guest squatting on the edge of a camp bed in a corner.
One clay figure breathing.
One sculptor gasping.
It seems there are cliffs in art.
Failing to avoid the cliff,
he walked over the edge
and after that, there was nothing.
He ended his life.
Not because he hated the world
Not because he hated himself.
Because art had been driven out.
Lovers
In the winter of 1953
Jiri Mountain was the main objective.
The path to Jiri Mountain crosses many steep mountains.
The Imsil contingent found itself scattered all over the ridges
when it got cut off from the main battleline.
News came that the guerilla unit in Huimun Mountain had been annihilated.
Feet were heavy as they marched on by night.
The Jiri Mountain contingent
were sure to be attacked by the expeditionary forces.
Where could the sixth division of the 102nd guards’ battalion be?
They too must have been attacked.
Each evening they cut arrowroot vines and plaited shelters,
with pine branches to form a roof.
Mount Jang-an was full of expeditionary forces.
Night fell.
Flashlights were moving upward.
The lights of the expeditionary forces.
They ran madly, walked, crawled.
They wedged themselves under rocks.
Nearby
two people were holding their breath and trembling.
In the falling snow
those two were comrades:
a woman member of the contingent, Gang Sun-ok
and a straggler from the People’s Army, Jang Gwan-ho.
Where had the other members of the contingent gone?
We’ve fallen into those bastards’ trap.
It would be a waste of energy
to go on wandering.
Let’s see what things are like here.
Sleep overcame them.
A loudspeaker rang out from below:
You’re surrounded.
Come out quietly with your hands up.
Let yourselves be embraced by the Republic of Korea.
They heard it in their sleep
as day broke.
The two were found lying side by side.
Their hands were blue with frostbite.
Barefoot, for they had taken the wrappings off their feet.
Locked in a tight embrace, they did not move.
Soldiers shook them
but they did not budge.
They had frozen to death in the night.
That girl from the South, Gang Sun-ok,
and the man from the North
must have fallen in love on their march over the mountains.
Loving
then dying,
no rancour remains.
They were not far from the secret hideout.
Unable to make it there
and dying,
no rancour remains.
Im Chang-ho’s Death Anniversary
There were almost no young men left in Jeju Island.
They had all been drafted into the army,
or sent to distant coal mines,
or conscripted to fight in the South Sea Islands.
From every seaside village
twenty
or thirty
had gone off en masse.
In one village
twenty-five gone off
between the ages of eighteen and thirty left.
The girls left to be comfort women.
Once they left
after a couple of postcards
there was no more news.
At the end of the Japanese occupation,
even the houses were requisitioned for the military,
the harvested grain taken to feed the army.
Those remaining,
between the ages of fourteen
and seventy were mobilised.
In the days of forced labour
one or two hundred
were forced to work in canteens.
When Japan surrendered,
some three hundred corpses
were piled up at the workplaces.
Such was Liberation.
Such was Jeju Island at Liberation.
Half the young folk who had been taken away
didn’t come back.
Those who came back
were injured,
were invalids.
A few lights floated on the sea at night
from boats fishing for hairtail.
Im Gyeong-bok
of Bonggae-dong in the hilly regions of Jeju Island
could not find the body of his father Im Chang-ho.
He searched three different forced-labour camps
but could not locate his father’s body
among the corpses.
Weeping bitterly
he burned a set of his father’s clothes
and put the ashes
into the grave mound for his father.
That was on August 17, 1945,
two days after Liberation.
He chose August 15,
Liberation Day,
as his father’s death anniversary day.
‘Father!
Father!’
Returning home
after building the grave mound
he called out toward the horizon.
‘Father!’
That night in a dream
his father came back in a boat.
The Lady Eom
Queen Min, who stood up to the Daewon-gun, her father-in-law,
was a fearsome woman.
On the faces of the court ladies
who slept with her husband King Gojong
she inflicted all kinds of scars,
and added all kinds of harsh punishments.
She was murdered one night by a band of Japanese thugs.
Her dead body was burned,
became a handful of bones
that someone secretly buried.
Later, the Lady Eom,
who had kept her distance from Queen Min, was called
to be the recipient of Gojong’s love.
Lady Eom was benevolent.
The courtiers felt relieved at last.
This wise queen,
separately from the schools of the foreign missionaries
founded Yanjeong School,
Jinmyeong Ladies’ School,
Sukmyeong Ladies’ School with money from the privy purse
and her own resources.
Yangjeong School offered traditi
onal education,
Jinmyeong and Sukmyeong aimed at modern education.
In the end her son Eun, known as King Yeongchin,
was sent away to Japan as a hostage at the age of eleven.
His royal father
and royal mother were broken-hearted.
His royal father
inscribed for him the character ‘endure’.
His mother, the Lady Eom, died of typhoid fever
before ever seeing again the Crown Prince, her only son.
Yi Hae-myeong’s Wife
During the war, people were less than animals.
During the war,
they were insects, they were netted fish.
They wriggled
they flapped, they collapsed, grew stiff.
People were as vulgar as vulgar could be.
On March 5, 1951,
people went into air-raid shelters
and shook with fear of being bombed.
At the least sound of a plane
cold sweat ran down their backs.
Once the sound of the plane had died away
vegetables came out, meat appeared,
rice-cakes too appeared
in front of the Central Cinema at Wangsim-ni.
They had to go on living amidst the bombs.
They had to buy and sell.
If a bomb fell somewhere close,
the merchants vanished
leaving their bundles of cabbages where they were.
In March the Chinese forces began to retreat.
On March 10 the People’s Army withdrew.
Yi Hae-myeong, from the royal line of Joseon,
was forced to go with the People’s Army as a volunteer.
In streets littered with corpses
Yi Hae-myeong’s wife
wore men’s underwear
and came out to sell women’s clothes.
She never hid during bombing raids
but stayed in her market corner
Even when she’d had nothing to eat for three days
her face retained its human dignity,
female modesty too,
and her woman’s patience
remained alive, enduring the pain deep inside her.
In a rough age
she remained, still a human being.
DDT
Soon after Liberation in 1945,
Seoul began to swarm with 370 different political parties and civic groups.
Every morning when you woke up
several more had hung out their signboards.
Parties of just five members appeared, without even a signboard.
The commander of the occupying forces, General Hodge,
detested the Koreans, calling them cats or worse.
All the Koreans working in Hodge’s headquarters
and the Koreans in the streets
outside his headquarters
were liberally doused in DDT.
Smothered in that poisonous powder
the Koreans would giggle helplessly
while seething with shame.
Thanks to the Americans who came for the war
in 1950 Korea again became a land of DDT.
Fleas, bugs and the plentiful lice and nits about their bodies,
even the invisible microbes,
were uncivilised
so the Americans drenched the Koreans
in plentiful quantities of DDT.
All the orphans likewise
received baptisms in Hallelujah and DDT.
Offspring with neither dad nor mom became the offspring of DDT.
Choi Johan, a war orphan,
had as his family name that of the director of his orphanage, Zion Home,
and as his given name
the John of the Gospel of St. John.
His original name, Bak Seon-sik was completely forgotten.
Since his room happened to be next to a stinking cesspool,
Choi Johan’s blanket
always smelt of a mixture of sewage and DDT.
Ah, home, sweet home.
Yi Jeong-i’s family
They walked all the way from Jinnampo in North Korea
to Hongseong in South Korea’s Chungcheong province.
They walked and walked.
For twenty days they fled.
Yi Jeon-hae
and her sister Yi Jeong-i
with their parents following them.
All day long walking with nothing to eat.
When they found a well
they drank then walked on in the flesh-biting cold.
They dreaded the American troops
so they smeared their clothes
with their own shit.
They spread soot from kitchen chimneys
over their faces.
The mother became
a beggar-mum,
her daughters beggar kids
Their bodies stank of shit.
Instead of American troops, dogs came running.
Their robust father
likewise
blackened his face. The teeth inside his lips looked stronger still.
When snow fell
they ventured into a village
and were saved by a shed
or an empty cowstall.
Three hundred miles they walked
to arrive at Hongseong, and settle there.
When China attacked in January 1951,
Chinese forces never reached Hongseong,
being held back near the 38th parallel.
The family began a new life amidst the hills and fields of Hongseong,
purchased a big hospital.
One daughter, Yi Jeong-i, got married,
became the wife of poet-professor Kim Young-moo. Never late for Mass.
An Empty House
In Jangsa-dong, central Seoul, a big tiled-roof house lay empty.
After Seoul was recaptured for the second time
someone, intent on taking over the house,
came along, snarling:
‘This house used to be a red’s; from now on it’s mine.’
Another man came along, snarling:
‘I must live here.
A red killed my brother.’
Yet another man came along, accompanied by an MP.
‘I’m anti-communist fighter Bak Jong-sik, don’t you know?
You two, get out.
This house should belong to an anti-communist fighter.
Down with Kim Il-sung!
Defeat the communist party!’
Bak Jong-sik, a relative of the MP, took over the house.
After the MP left in his jeep,
the new owner moved into the empty house.
He removed the spider webs.
He had a name-plate made.
He bought a fierce dog.
‘Beware of the dog!’ was painted on the gate.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Born in 1933 in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, Korea, Ko Un is Korea’s foremost living writer. After immense suffering during the Korean War, he became a Buddhist monk. His first poems were published in 1958, his first collection in 1960. A few years later he returned to the world. After years of dark nihilism, he became a leading spokesman in the struggle for freedom and democracy during the 1970s and 1980s, when he was often arrested and imprisoned.
He has published more than 150 volumes of poems, essays, and fiction, including the monumental seven-volume epic Mount Paekdu and the 30-volume Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) series. In recent years, more than thirty volumes of translations of his work have been published in some twenty languages. A selection from the first ten volumes of Maninbo relating to Ko Un’s village childhood was published in the US by Green Integer in 2006 under the title Ten Thousand Lives. A selection from the second ten volumes, Maninbo: Peace and War, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. Ko Un’s most recent poetry was translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Lee Sang-Wha and publ
ished by Bloodaxe in 2012 in First Person Sorrowful. See: http://www.koun.co.kr
Born in 1942 in Cornwall, Brother Anthony of Taizé has lived in Korea since 1980. He is an Emeritus Professor at Sogang University, and Chair-Professor at Dankook University. He has published some thirty volumes of English translations of Korean poetry and fiction, including eight volumes of work by Ko Un. He is a naturalised Korean citizen with the name An Sonjae. For more information see http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/
Lee Sang-Wha is an emeritus professor in the English Department of Chung Ang University, Seoul, and has published seven volumes of translations of English literature including two prose works by Gary Snyder.
Copyright
Copyright © Ko Un 2015
Translations & introductory material
© Brother Anthony of Taizé & Lee Sang-Wha 2015
First published 2015 by
Bloodaxe Books Ltd,
Eastburn,
South Park,
Hexham,
Northumberland NE46 1BS.
This ebook edition first published in 2015.
www.bloodaxebooks.com
For further information about Bloodaxe titles
please visit our website or write to
the above address for a catalogue.
THE DAISAN FOUNDATION
Thanks are due to The Daisan Foundation for financial support