Authors: Ko Un
The reason why there is night should be the stars. Beneath the starlight of the night sky I have lived the chronology of my poetry.
In October 1979 I provided one of the motivations for an incident by which the most blatant dictatorship in modern Korean history had to be brought to an end. After the assassination of the dictator, I was freed from prison. However, in May the following year, with the second military coup, I abruptly became a criminal, guilty of conspiring to rebel, violating martial law, and inciting others to violate martial law, etc.
The special cell in the military prison was a closed space without windows, measuring 1.5 metres by 1 metre. Given the state of emergency in force then, my very survival was most uncertain. I had already decided what my final gesture would be when the time came for me to die. Deprived of present time in that despair, the incompetent act of remembering alone served as a substitute for the present time. I began to realise that remembering and imagining something could be a source of strength, enabling me to endure day by day the darkness and the fear.
The works that I would have to write if I survived and went back to the world were born in that way. Those were the seeds for the seven-volume epic
Mount Baekdu
and the thirty-volume
Maninbo
(Ten Thousand Lives). Thanks to campaigns inside Korea and abroad, I came back out into the world a few years later. Marrying belatedly at fifty, I began life with my wife. This married life has been a time filling my epic and lyrical works with the sound of the waves of the ocean.
I don’t think that the active volcano of my poetic passion that once again began to erupt was a destiny allotted to me only. It was a blessing descending to me through the blood of all the sounds of birds and animals living in the primeval forests of the tropical regions on the Pacific equator as well as of the lengthy oral narratives, lasting several days, that were transmitted in the Eurasian continent since prehistoric times.
Maninbo
is a collection of songs about the people I have come to know in this world. The encounters I have had are no private matter, but essentially public. This public nature cannot vanish by
our personal forgetfulness or neglect. It is the commemoration of the truth of life itself, resisting ephemeral nature. Even one of our trivial meetings has an integrality of history contained within it. I took that as a principle, so I tried to depict not only people’s noble aspects but also their ugly ones.
Maninbo
begins with portraits of the villagers of my home town from my childhood in the 1930s. And the central five volumes, from volume 16 to volume 20, are filled with random, fragmentary portraits evoking the several millions who died during the three years of the Korean War from 1950, as well as those who survived amidst the ruins of war.
I did not try to portray only people. It was because human beings cannot exist without the ‘mandala’ of this world. Part of my task was to manifest the world. I finished
Maninbo
with thirty volumes, in which some 4,000 people come on the stage from all walks of life, from our country’s history and land. That also includes those whom I met in my years of wandering and those who appeared briefly at turning points in Korea’s history.
Maninbo
is both my poetic study of people and my nameless historic act. For a poet cannot live without the organic function of history. Having completed this project, I truly had the feeling that I had made the past lives of those people whom I met or whom I did not meet present, one by one, either in reality or in history. This is also a realisation of the mourning that has been one of the topics of my writing.
While I was writing
Maninbo
I strove to overcome to some degree the poetic first-person. Frame is sometimes fatal. The poet opens his eyes in the grey of today’s morning leaving the light of the previous day behind. In recent years I have raised questions regarding the poetic speaking voice: how I could bring multiple poetic, metaphorical selves to life through the first-person ‘I’ in a poem, how I could attain the truth of each one of endless others, for how long ‘I’ could remain me, with no end.
The view that wouldn’t take poetry as anything more than a kind of fantasy existed already in ancient times and Lukács also expressed it. Even without that, I was sure that I did not want to defend for ever the identity of the speaker in a poem.
If the modern age is the age of the self, then according to this ostentatious common sense modern poetry is a poetry that realises
the self. The ‘I’ as the subject in modern poetry is accepted as an almost absolute condition. The ‘I’ in poetry is something like an event as moving as when four-legged animals first became two-legged humans and stood on the ground. The world becomes different for the first time with that.
However, the modern self might never be a gift that we could receive easily. The path leading to the self is incomparably challenging. The ideology of God, the ideology of the group repressed for long outpourings of the self. History has shown a violence that tramples down the potential of the self.
In the time of the feudal ages of North-East Asia, Korea designated the majority of the subjugated classes as nameless objects. In such regions, the self was bound to appear either as a threat or an unexpected force, or too late. The period of division following the Japanese colonial period was also much more of an adversity to the self. ‘I’ barely survived by killing ‘I’. Apart from these adversities, ‘I’ have not dropped anchor until today, with an acute recognition that there is no way to seek for the self.
The ‘I’ in modern Korean poetry has these hard times as wounds. But when such an ‘I’ becomes stuck in the barbarous egocentrism of modernity, if another self that can take it out does not appear, we would have a reality of double pain.
The speaking ‘I’ is an illusion if it does not have the ‘exterior’ of mind, that constitutes a necessary prerequisite for the imagining of a narrative structure about people and the world and human self-discovery. Statements about reality and the portrayal of society and humanity would be reduced to a dried-up river-bed if there were no memoir of imagination. Here I dream of a new third-person narrator. Now the third-person is not something matching the absolute first and second-person, but signifies the inner dialectic of those.
When we ponder whether modernity is a creative age that has liberated the self, when there is almost no ground for claiming that modernity is not a chronicle that has exercised a violence of control repressing the self, then we come to realise how wounded the modern self is. Therefore, we have to seek ‘a new other of the self’ by re-modernising the modern and reflecting on the modern self. In this respect, the flash of a poet who said that our soul is a dream for others is still vibrating. ‘I’ am reborn in another’s dream.
It is certain that all the interiority of poetry will breathe anew so long as poetry has a yearning for the exterior that is the source of poetry. The self is a complex body that has an exterior as an expansion of the self and an interior as a interlocking of the self. It is therefore no empty words to say that all the world resides in a mote of dust. Penetrating into the world! We can explain this as: when the self becomes other, that is another self and from there a new self as another is born, then the speaker in a poem will return to ultimate selflessness. I cannot exist without you, without a committed devotion to you, and ultimately ‘I’ become not only you but the third-person Indra’s Net that is an infinite plural of ‘I’ and ‘you’ and attain an emptiness that is neither private nor public. That emptiness is the Buddhist ‘being in profundity’. The speaking ‘I’ is the world of an ‘other I.’
The world of
Maninbo
is a world where unfamiliar relationships evolve between the poet, the speaking voice, and the subject being depicted or the action existing between the lines. An interpretation of human beings is possible in the process in which they establish inseparable, irreversible relationships. It is the never-ending life where you are I, I am you, and you are he or someone and that someone is another I…the movement of the world. The stage for the social cycle which begets the freedom of ‘I’ and others is the space of
Maninbo
. I, the author, cannot but be an alter ego of that ‘I’. Society is like that. Therefore, the distinction between good and evil, beautiful and ugly can be valid only when we get rid of the logic of one domination. Dream produces a cyclical ethics, like a snake biting its own tail.
Many years ago, a volume of English translations of poems selected from volumes 1 through 10 of
Maninbo
was published in the US. The present volume contains poems selected from volumes 11 through 20. The subjects of many of the poems in this volume are obtained from the traces of my experiences prior to and during the 1950s. They depict tragic scenes – situations of life and imminent death, the things that happened when traditional society collapsed, existence and ruins, incursion of ideology, migrations of population, a war that caused dehumanisation, and the possibility of humanity in that war. The ruins gave birth to what follows despair.
The portraits of Korean people gain universality in that they are not only portraits of Koreans but the portraits of human beings.
My dream is that this volume, including poems that contain the situations and truth of an atrocious period on the Korean peninsula, will serve to offer the opportunity for us to reflect on the human world where wars have never ceased.
Uisang, the great Korean monk of ancient times, spread all over the Korean peninsula the Buddhist Huayan notion that ‘All is one, one is all’. 1500 years after him, my mind too opens its arms wide toward the fetal movement of a mote of dust and, on the largest scale, the grandiose action of the expansion of the universe.
KO UN
Maninbo
(Ten Thousand Lives) is the title of a remarkable collection of poems by Ko Un, filling thirty volumes, a total of four thousand and one poems containing the names of 5600 people, which took 30 years to complete. Ko Un first conceived the idea while confined in a solitary cell upon his arrest in May 1980, the first volumes appeared in 1986, and the project was completed 25 years after publication began, in 2010. Robert Hass, former American Poet Laureate, who has also written a long essay on
Maninbo
, remarked on the completion of the huge project in 2010, âThat poem, or the part of it that has moved and excited readers of the English translation, is a gift to the world, a stunning portrait of the 20th century in all its humanity and violence, and a tribute to the vitality of the Korean people.' It is certainly hard to think of any other contemporary poet's work which can rival
Maninbo
in its complexity, its sheer vitality, and its ability to cover so many aspects of a nation's history. It becomes even more amazing when we remember the eighty other volumes of poetry and prose Ko Un published in the years during which he was working on
Maninbo
.
An earlier volume of translations in English published in the United States in 2005 contained some 160 poems from volumes 1 to 10 of
Maninbo
. This present volume contains poems from volumes 11 to 20. We hope that a third volume will offer poems from the last ten volumes.
The last half of this volume is selected from volumes 16 to 20 of
Maninbo
, which is focused on the sufferings of the Korean people during the Korean War. We have made our selections with consideration of how ordinary people suffer from warfare in a world that has, in recent times, never known a period without war. We have also considered what might be most accessible to readers unfamiliar with the events of Korean history.
Ko Un first conceived the
Maninbo
project while he was in prison after the military coup of May 1980. Languishing in solitary confinement in a military prison, unsure whether he might be executed or not, he found his mind filling with memories of the people he had met or heard of during his life. Finally, he made a vow that, if he was released from prison, he would write poems about each
of them. In part this would be a means of rescuing from oblivion countless lives that would otherwise be lost, and also it would serve to offer a vision of the history of Korea as it has been lived by its entire population through the centuries. The poems are written in a particular style, created by Ko Un and named by him âpopular-historical poetry'. Essentially narrative, each poem offers a brief glimpse of an individual's life. Some span an entire existence, some relate a brief moment. Some are celebrations of remarkable lives, others recall terrible events and inhuman beings. Some poems are humorous, others are dark commemorations of unthinkable incidents. They span the whole of Korean history, from earliest pre-history to the present time.
We have tried to preserve the specific flavour of the Korean poems, which are free in structure, brief evocations, divided often into short sections, with snatches of dialogue, glimpses of events. We are very grateful to the American poet Hillel Schwartz for reading our translations and making insightful suggestions for poetic improvement. We have avoided overloading the poems with explanatory notes and assume that readers will consult a map of Korea if they wish to identify the many places named in the poems. The history of Korea, like its geography, is not well-known in the world at large. We hope that this collection will help many discover the tragic yet intensely human lives that so many Koreans have led, simply, nobly, often with immense dignity amidst a painful reality.
BROTHER ANTHONY OF TAIZÃ
& LEE SANG-WHA
These poems contain so many references to Korean history, ancient and modern, that the reader will soon be looking for help. Explanations are best done in a separate general summary, rather than by multiple notes to individual poems.
Korea is today divided into South and North Korea, officially designated as the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, respectively. Together, they occupy the entire Korean Peninsula. This division is recent, the fruit of the Korean War. Historically, we find the peninsula divided into a number of distinct kingdoms at the start of the present era, but for many centuries the whole peninsula was a single nation. In the northern-most part, originally centred in and reaching far into what was later known as Manchuria, was Goguryeo. That kingdom, recorded as having been established in 37
BC
, lasted as an independent entity until 669.
The southern border of Goguryeo slowly moved southward down the peninsula until it reached the region now occupied by Seoul. The western portion of southern Korea was governed by the kingdom known as Baekje, founded in 18
BC
and independent until 660. Further south, the south-east portion of the peninsula was occupied by Silla, with its capital in the city now known as Gyeongju, where the dynasty was founded in 57
BC
and continued as a kingdom until 918, starting as a local kingdom, then becoming an enlarged ‘Unified Silla’ integrating the Gaya kingdom in 532, Baekje in 660, and then Goguryeo in 668 with the military support of Tang China.
After a long period of dynastic decline, the royal dynasty of Silla was toppled and a new dynasty arose, known as Goryeo, established in 918 and lasting until 1392, with its main capital much further to the north, for much of the time in Gaeseong, to the north of what is now Seoul. Buddhism had entered all parts of Korea well before the Silla unification. It formed a very strong feature in the culture of Goryeo, when temples became rich and powerful while individual monks exercised great influence at court.
Finally, just as Ming China was emerging after the end of the Mongol domination, Korean court politics led to the overturn of the reigning dynasty of Goryeo and a new dynasty was proclaimed in 1392, with the name Joseon. The new royal family bore the family name Yi. The kingdom of Joseon, or the Joseon era, lasted until 1897, during which time it remained in a tribute-relationship with the Chinese emperor. The capital city was relocated to the town of Hanyang, which was renamed ‘Seoul’ (meaning ‘Capital city’). The Joseon era was marked by a strong reaction against Buddhism and an equally strong emphasis on a rigid form of Confucianism. Many hundreds of temples were destroyed, monks were not allowed to enter Seoul, and those temples that survived were mostly located in remote rural areas.
Near the start of the Joseon era, under the reign of King Sejong, the Korean alphabet (‘hangeul’) was invented to allow easy writing of the multiple syllables of Korean grammar, as well as those Korean words which did not correspond to any Chinese character. The written language of education and administration was Classical Chinese and the high-class scholars saw no need for this new invention. It was branded ‘women’s writing’ and only came into its own with the beginning of modernity late in the 19th century.
The greatest crisis during the Joseon era was the Japanese invasion that began in 1592. That year was known in Korea as Imjin year and therefore the entire invasion is often known as the Imjin Wars. The invasion was launched by Toyotomi Hideyoshi with the aim of crossing Korea, marching into China and conquering it. He had wrongly assumed that the Koreans would offer no resistance. When Korea asserted its loyalty to China, and thwarted the Japanese plan, the Japanese armies turned against Korea and systematically set about burning it. Almost every significant building in Korea was destroyed in the years that followed. China belatedly sent forces to support Korea and finally, with the death of Hideyoshi in 1598, the Japanese withdrew.
In the following century, the Manchus established the Qing dynasty in China in 1644. Joseon felt a strong loyalty to Ming China on account of the help they had provided against the Japanese. Therefore they opposed the Manchu and this led to two Manchu invasions of Joseon, in 1627 and again in 1637, ending in humiliating
defeat for the Koreans. Late Joseon was marked by intense rivalry between different court factions, which led at times to violent purges and multiple exiles. The Joseon era was marked by a fierce resistance to all contact with the rest of the world, beyond strictly controlled relations with China and Japan.
Modern history in the Far East began on 3 January 1868, when the new Emperor of Japan made a formal declaration of the restoration of his power. This was the beginning of the Meiji Reforms, by which Japan emerged from isolation and became part of the modern world. Japan soon awakened to the possibility that it, too, might establish an empire and a first step would be to gain control of Korea. The Ganghwa Treaty between Japan and Joseon was signed on 26 February 1876. The United States and the other major western powers were not far behind.
Japan had already determined to take control of the Korean peninsula, stationing armed forces and police there, and in 1896 a group of Japanese thugs murdered the Korean Queen, Queen Min, for opposing the Japanese plans. In the decade that followed, Japan ruthlessly robbed Korea of its independence and forced Gojong, the king of Joseon, off the throne when he tried to resist. In 1910 Joseon was formally annexed by Japan. For the following decades Chosen was the name of a colonised Japanese province, where all education and administration used uniquely the Japanese language and where Korean culture was treated with disdain. Thousands of Koreans, reduced to penury, either fled to Manchuria or went to seek work in Japan.
On 1 March 1919, exasperated by years of intense Japanese repression, the Korean population staged street demonstrations demanding independence, the March 1 Independence Movement. After this, a Provisional Government in Exile was established in Shanghai and later groups of militant independence fighters would fight guerrilla campaigns against the Japanese in Manchuria and Siberia.
Then came the Pacific War, which ended on 15 August 1945, with the surrender of Japan. One condition of the act of surrender was that Japan would withdraw from all occupied territories, including Korea, so this date is known in Korea as ‘Liberation’. A
few weeks before this, at a meeting of the allied leaders in Cairo, the United States had proposed and the Soviet Union agreed that after the defeat of Japan, Korea would be occupied by the US and the USSR, each taking responsibility for half the peninsula, defined by the 38th parallel running just north of Seoul.
The Americans brought with them a Korean exile who had long lived in the US, Yi Seung-man, known in the West as Dr Syngman Rhee. Meanwhile, many Koreans across southern Korea believed that they had now gained the freedom to run their country for themselves as they thought best, following more or less socialistic models. They were very soon branded ‘Communists’ (‘Palgaengi’ or ‘reds’) by supporters of Syngman Rhee and the American Military Government. Some took to the hills as guerrillas. The result was a reign of terror in which countless innocent folk were massacred as ‘reds’. One of the most notorious and atrocious mass-acres happened in Jeju Island on 3 April 1948, when thousands of innocent civilians, including children, were killed.
Meanwhile, in the northern half of the peninsula, the USSR quickly handed control to the local Communist Party with the support of many guerrila fighters returning from Manchuria and Siberia. Hundreds of Christians and landowners began to flee southward, while many of Korea’s brightest intellectuals and writers rejoiced in the establishment of a socialist regime in the North and were glad to go there to support it. As a result of the growth of the Cold War, in 1948 two opposing republics of Korea, South and North, were proclaimed, each claiming to control the entire Korean peninsula.
On 25 June 1950, the North Korean army (Korean People’s Army, KPA) began to advance southward across the 38th parallel. This act of aggression or invasion was brought to the attention of the United Nations Security Council, which the USSR was then boycotting, and after debating the matter, the Security Council recommended that member states provide military assistance to the Republic of Korea.
As they launched their first attack, the North Koreans had a combined force that included tanks supported by heavy artillery; the South Koreans, lacking tanks, anti-tank weapons, or heavy
artillery, could not stop such an attack. On 27 June, Syngman Rhee evacuated secretly from Seoul with some of the government. The next day the South Korean Army blew up the only bridge across the Han River in an attempt to stop the North Korean army. The bridge was blown up without warning while 4,000 refugees were crossing it, and hundreds were killed. Seoul fell to North Korea that same day.
By August, the allies controlled only a small area in the vicinity of Pusan, in south-east Korea. The rest of the country was declared part of the North Korean ‘People’s Republic’. General MacArthur landed a large force at Incheon, on the west coast, on 15 September 1950. On 25 September, Seoul was recaptured and the North Koreans soon began to retreat northwards.
By 1 October 1950, the North Koreans had withdrawn past the 38th parallel; the UN forces followed them northwards, meeting minimal resitance, and soon the allied forces had reached the Chinese border. The Chinese decided to intervene. After secretly crossing the Yalu River on 19 October, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) launched their first offensive, attacking the advancing UN forces near the border. The UN forces began to retreat and were forced back below the 38th parallel border in mid December.
On New Year’s Eve of 1950, the Chinese launched a new offensive into South Korea, which overwhelmed the UN forces, allowing the PVA and KPA on 4 January 1951 to conquer Seoul for the second time. The withdrawal of the allied forces together with most of the population from Seoul is known as the ‘January Retreat’. Two months later, the PVA and the KPA were again dislodged from Seoul (14 March 1951) and by the end of May, the allies had established the so-called ‘Line Kansas’ just north of the 38th parallel. Then began a stalemate that lasted until the Armistice of 1953. The ‘Line Kansas’ (or Kansas Line) was to form the basis for the present frontier between the two Koreas.
Armistice negotiations began 10 July 1951 at Kaesong. They continued for two years, first at Kaesong, afterwards relocated at Panmunjom. The final armistice agreement was signed on 27 July 1953, by the UN Command, China and North Korea. The Republic of Korea did not sign. The two Koreas were to be separated by a demilitarised zone (DMZ). Prisoners of war not wishing to be
returned to their home countries were allowed to ask to be sent to a neutral third country.
Syngman Rhee remained as president at the head of an increasingly corrupt regime, desperately holding onto power by all means. Finally, the citizens began to protest, provoked by blatantly falsified election results early in 1960. On 19 April 1960 thousands of university students and high school students marched on the Blue House, the presidential mansion, demanding new elections and calling for Rhee’s resignation, their numbers growing to over 100,000. Police opened fire on the protestors, killing approximately 180 and wounding thousands. On 26 April, President Rhee stepped down from power and went into voluntary exile. This series of events is known as the ‘April Revolution’.
South Korea adopted a parliamentary system which considerably weakened the power of the president and so, while Yun Bo-seon was elected President on 13 August 1960, real power was vested in the prime minister. Following months of political instability, on 19 May 1961 Lt General Park Chung-hee launched a coup d’état overthrowing the short-lived Second Republic of South Korea and replacing it with a military junta and later the autocratic Third Republic of South Korea. Almost at once, he authorised the establishment in 1961 of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). This was the notorious office responsible for the repression of political and social dissent throughout his time in power, and beyond. After Yun resigned in 1962, Lt General Park consolidated his power by becoming acting president. In 1963, he was elected president in his own right. In 1971, Park won another close election against his rival, Kim Dae-jung. Shortly after being sworn in, he declared a state of emergency, and in October 1972, Park dissolved the legislature and suspended the 1963 constitution. The so-called Yushin (‘revitalising’) Constitution was approved in a heavily-rigged plebiscite in November 1972.
Meanwhile, South Korea had begun the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation that were to catapult it to its current position in the world. This was done at the expense of many basic human rights, with low wages, absence of trade unions, arbitrary arrests and random killings. Finally, as more and more people were
taking to the streets to demand a return to democracy and a liberalisation of society, Park seemed to be preparing a violent crackdown when he was assassinated by Kim Jae-gyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, on 26 October, 1979.
For a while, it seemed that the dreamed-of restoration of democracy might happen, but on 18 May 1980, General Chun Doo-hwan staged a coup while provoking an uprising in the south-western city of Gwangju which left hundreds dead. All the leading dissidents, including Ko Un, were thrown into prison and a new dictatorship began…
After continuing resistance and sacrifice on the part of many dissidents, climaxing in huge demonstrations in June 1987 which forced the dictatorial regime to accept a democratic Constitution, Korea was finally able to elect a civilian president in 1992. Since then, in spite of ongoing ideological conflicts between Left and Right, Korea has continued to develop her democratic system, while becoming one of the world’s leading economic powers.