Writers From the Other Asia (Page 5)

Ko Un, Korea's most renowned living poet, remembers the privations of the colonial era. Figuring prominently in his poems is the "barley hump" of the spring, when the winter stores have been eaten, the new barley crop has yet to ripen and the annual starvation sets in. As a young boy during the Korean War, Ko Un watched the deaths of friends and family and could do nothing to save them. At the end of the war, he worked as a gravedigger. Fertilized by all this death, his poetry bloomed:

Mow down parents and children
This, that, and the others,
everything else.
Knife them in the dark.
Next morning
the world is piled with death.
Our chore is burying them all day

and building a new world on it.

During his varied life, Ko Un has been a youthful scalawag, Buddhist monk, drunkard, teacher, political activist, jailed dissident and, now, Nobel Prize contender. He has published more than 100 books of poetry and prose. But his greatest claim to fame is Maninbo, or Ten Thousand Lives, which the American poet Robert Haass has described as "one of the most extraordinary projects in contemporary literature." Ko Un conceived of this project holed up in a military prison with other prominent dissidents. He vowed to write a poem for every person he had ever known, from his closest relatives to historical figures he'd only met in books. Green Integer has published a one-volume selection of this vast work for the first time in English, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim and Gary Gach.

Missing from the collection, unfortunately, is Ko Un's original introduction, in which he issued a declaration of independence from all foreign literary influence. No longer would he be seduced by graceful Chinese evocations of nature or the cryptic modernism of the West. In their place, Ko Un has constructed a rustic vernacular, a poetry of the Korean countryside as earthy as the mountain vegetables that deepen the flavor of Korean food. In these poems, a woman has "a laugh like cold bean-sprout soup," a man is so dull that he is "cousin of water,/or of watered-down soy-sauce." Each poem resembles a miniature folk tale, expressed with koan-like simplicity, cautious of metaphors or abstraction. Much of South Korean history is poured into this folkloric mold, from the partisan fighter who gave birth in her cell before being hanged at the scaffold in the early 1950s all the way to dissident Kim Dae Jung, "the embodiment of suffering/at a time when suffering was needed," who became president in the 1990s.

This commemoration of Korean history and countryside, freed from strictures of form and diction imposed from the outside, follows in the tradition of minjung, or "people's" culture. Ko Un has "gone to the people" for his inspiration, much like the narodniks, the Russian radicals of the nineteenth century, and the South Korean student movement activists of the 1980s who emulated them. But Ko Un has not summoned up some ethereal concept of the People. Maninbo, his masterpiece, is the People made flesh. Thanks to Ko Un, they continue to walk among us, all 10,000 of them.

Ko Un's counterpart has not yet emerged--or been allowed to emerge-- in North Korea. The Soviet bloc was rich with the samizdat of dissident poets and the semi-official work of writers during one thaw or another. North Korea has none of that. Even among the several thousand North Koreans who live in South Korea, no literary work has appeared (though one defector has written a musical about the North Korean prison labor camp at Yodok). Very little of the official literature has even been translated into English. One novel, Han Sorya's Jackals, has appeared, as have several short stories. Since North Korean author Hon Sok-jung's novel Hwangjini won a prestigious South Korean prize in 2004 and official North Korean literature is more available in the South, some of this work might soon make its way into English.

In the meantime, we are left with a tantalizing glimpse of literary changes afoot in North Korea in a 1999 story nimbly translated by Stephen Epstein and published in a recent issue of the online magazine Words Without Borders. Han Ung-bin's "Second Encounter" draws on the usual North Korean boilerplate about building a strong and prosperous nation. But Han also alludes to the hardships of the famine years of the mid-1990s. And most of the story involves an encounter during a 1989 youth festival in Pyongyang between a foreign journalist and a literal-minded North Korean, mediated by the story's narrator. The misunderstandings are nearly comic, for the journalist can't quite believe that this average North Korean might live an ordinary life with an ordinary job and family, in a society with functioning schools and hospitals, with soft drinks for the kids and trips to the amusement park.

Such an ordinary existence was once within reach. North Korea's social system suffered enormous strains during the famine years. Schools and hospitals did not function as before. The merry-go-rounds rusted. "We have lost nothing," the narrator reflects upon the intervening years, referring more to patriotic fervor than material comforts. But North Koreans might read wistfulness or even concealed anger into Han's story. "Second Encounter" lends itself to more than one interpretation, which suggests a movement from simple propaganda toward actual literature.

It is still a far cry, of course, from an appraisal of North Korea's labor camps, extrajudicial killings, history of purges and the like. This catharsis, whenever it comes, will be unspeakably painful. Korean novelists, poets and short-story writers have mined the atrocities of the colonial period, the Korean War and the South's authoritarian era. These are, unfortunately, rich veins. When North Koreans can openly testify like the ghosts of The Guest, when the han of North Koreans is given proper voice, when a North Korean Ko Un can tell us about the people and not just the People, Korean literature will have a fresh infusion of horror and inspiration.

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