Poetry and the struggle against Japan

These policies were applied with varying degrees of severity. After early years of intense linguistic oppression, Koreans stood up on March 1, 1919, and issued a first declaration of independence, which attracted some degree of international attention. Soon after, newspapers and publications in the Korean language were permitted. But only because they would permit a more efficient communication of official Japanese policies and attitudes to the people. Violence continued to be exercised against all aspects of Korean culture, including imprisonment and thousands of deaths, and there were noted atrocities, as when Japanese militia herded the population of a patriotic village into a church and set fire to it.

The 1919 Independence Movement largely failed to impress or affect the Japanese. Meanwhile, Japanese literary translation had made modern European poets familiar to young Koreans eagerly (or desperately) seeking a new way to express themselves. There is no equivalent in the English poetic world to Mallarme, Rimbaud, Verlaine and the other French Symbolists, to say nothing of Baudelaire, or in German Rilke. In Korea, these were the western poets that first pointed the way ahead.

Partly, their impact had deep roots in the traditional way of writing poetry with Chinese characters. There all deep resonance has to be given by the selection of suggestive, often obscure and little-used, ideogrammes. Grammar vanishes, and the reader is left to imagine the indirect implications of what is being hinted at, rather than expressed. At the same time, the already very free prosody of vernacular Korean, with its flexible oral rhythms, could rejoice in the freedom given by vers libre to "follow nature".

Put very simply, it is the lack of any clear nationalistic, ethical, or social dimension in almost all 20th century western poetry that is probably most disconcerting for Korean readers and students, although they do not always realize it. In ancient (pre-20th century) Korea, each individual's identity was defined by three levels of fixed, involuntary obligation: to Heaven (cosmos), to King (state), to Family (father/ancestors). The ideal was to live in harmony with these three, which in practice meant subduing (or at least appearing to subdue) one's will and identity to the will and identity of the superior. The main focus was on harmony brought about by the submission of the lower to the higher, especially in Korean Neo-Confucianism.

There is a great difference between this individual and the western individual subject, who is essentially an autonomous bundle of feelings and thoughts wrapped in flesh, all the time wondering whether or not it would be good to form relationships with other similar subjects (with or without flesh) in romantic love, a social contract, or a religious covenant.

This suggests that the modern Korean experience of poetry may diverge radically from anything imaginable in English. We are not talking of protest, but of a fundamental national resistance. Poetry of resistance at the Korean level is not part of the English experience because no one has ever tried to abolish England or the English language, not even William the Conqueror. There are many ways in which an Irish or a Welsh reader will probably feel much more directly some of what is being implied by the Korean act of poetic composition. Similarly, young Koreans coming to Europe find themselves at ease with their contemporaries from Eastern Europe, and at a loss to understand the cynical attitudes of many western Europeans.

Interestingly, while criticizing the Romantics for their selfish individualism, my Korean students have found it quite easy to feel sympathy for what English poets such as Gray, Collins and the other so-called Pre-romantics were doing when they tried to find the ancient British bardic voice, expressed insecurity about the possibility of being a poet in modern times, and struggled with the difficulty of writing about the sufferings of rural societies from which their education had removed them. Where the direct didacticism and satire of Pope left them cold, the more veiled lyricism of Collins, with its implicit melancholy, and often mysterious images, touches them.

It is impossible to read 20th century Korean literature and criticism without being struck by the nationalism. Before condemning it as narrow-minded (which it sometimes is) we have to recall that no Korean can conceive of a personal identity distinct from a national identity. Every word written is a Korean word, each voice is the voice of Korea, because of what happened in the years 1895-1945 when there was no Korea on the map of the world.

In the poetry written during the time of the early Independence Movement, some works (poetry or prose) explicitly express resistance but they are few because open speech would at once lead to censorship, prison, even to death. After 1920, the predominant emotion was near-despair. Nothing at all seemed possible, except exile or suicide, and there is a great body of poetry (e.g. Pak Chong-hwa, Yi Sang-hwa) written in imitation of European decadence, tinged with nihilism, expressing visions of dark places, tears and sighing, sorrow, sickness, death. In appearance juvenile and sentimental, the underlying justification for such works was the fact that they corresponded faithfully to the intense experience of a whole people. As some have said, the glory of tragedy was denied the majority, because they had to go on living.

Others in the 1920s produced more dynamic expressions of a nationalistic spirit in the vers libre style (Han Yong-un) or in more traditional forms evoking the ancient culture, sometimes in forms of ballad (Kim So-wol), sometimes in echoes of sijo (Ch'oi Nam-son), all hoping to maintain a light in the midst of darkness. As one of the thirty-three patriots who formulated the March 1 Independence Proclamation, the Buddhist monk Han Yong-un (1879-1944) enjoys the highest position and his poetry is deeply venerated:

Others say, they love freedom, but I choose to obey.
Not that I do not appreciate freedom, but I long only to obey you.
When I do so, obeying is sweeter than beautiful freedom;
that is my happiness.
But if you order me to obey someone else,
I simply cannot be obedient to you,
For were I to obey him, I could be no longer free to obey you.
(Trans. Ko Won)

It is one hallmark of the poetry of these writers that formal images of romantic love between man and woman are often employed with symbolic force; it is very striking that the purely private kind of "love poetry" of the European tradition is virtually unknown, since intensity of experience needs the social dimensions. In Korea, poetic representations of a man or woman longing for a lost partner evoke audience response on the level of "yes, life is an ocean of pain, that's what we all feel, there's nothing to be done about it. Only weep and endure as you can, faithful to the bitter end."

In reading the poems of Kim Sowol, particularly, non-Korean readers often experience a clear conflict between what the poem seems to be saying and the nationalistic way it has long been received and interpreted in the official Korean academy:

When you go away at last,
sickened with the sight of me,
know that I shall let you go,
saying nothing, make no fuss;

but climbing high on Yongpyon's hills,
there I'll pick azalea flowers,
armfuls of purple, just to spread
along the pathways as you go

Then go, with muffled parting steps
trampling down those flowers you find
strewn before your departing feet;

and when you go away at last,
sickened with the sight of me,
know that for the life of me
I'll shed no tears then, no, not one.

No western reader could comprehend the extent to which this poem has become a national cultural monument, a defining icon of Koreanity. This is in some ways similar to the way poems were chosen for school textbooks in the Victorian period in England, only most of those were exhortations to "play up, play the gane" in a Henry Newbolt vein. This poem, though, is treasured in Korea for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its text as "pure poetry", but rather with the sacrificial suffering attitude to life underlying it.

An alternative dynamism, though, existed. Beyond the frontiers lay the Russian Revolution, the USSR was being formed. In China too, Marx and Lenin were becoming the sources of a struggle for another future. In Korea such references gave birth to a "proletarian literature" (Pak Yong-hi, Kim Ki-jin) in which the struggle against Japan was subsumed into the wider struggle against capitalism.

All of these views of poetry are strongly utilitarian; a reaction was inevitable, and by 1930 a younger generation (Kim Yong-nang, Pak Yong-ch'ol) had come up that urged the cause of pure lyricism, removed from politics or ideology. Yet when Kim Yong-nang quoted Keats's "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" he was writing in a situation where even such a statement had to be seen in the context of the continuing Japanese oppression of all Korean beauty. That equally transforms our reading of his most reputed poem, "Until peonies bloom":

Until peonies bloom
I shall still wait for my spring to come.
On the day that peonies drop their petals one by one,
I merely languish in sorrow at the loss of spring.
Then one day in May, one sultry day
when the fallen petals have all withered away
and there is no trace of peonies in all the world
my buoyant expectation crumbles in irrepressible sorrow.
Once the peonies have finished blooming, my year is done;
for three hundred and sixty gloomy days I sadly lament.

Outside influences continued to come in, and already young poets were following the ways of Modernism (Chong Ji-yong), Dadaism (Kim Nocholai), and Surrealism (Yi Sang); Eliot and Pound were the main guides of a poet like Kim Ki-rim, whose intellectualism stood far from the romantic sentiment of such effusions. Daily reality was the least of his concerns:


Look!
my mind is like glass--it clouds so easily,
like winter air at the slightest breath.

The reaction to my touch looked iron-hard
But after only one night of frost it cracked.

In snow storms it screams and cries.
At daybreak my cheeks are wet with tears.

This passion unkindled, a beacon for bats,
spending all night gazing at shooting stars.
Look!
my mind is like glass
even in moonlight it so easily breaks.

In the mid-1930s the voices of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer began to be heard through Japanese translations and there came a new reaction, this time in the direction of "life" (So Chong- ju, Yu Ch'i-hwan). These poets believed that the language of poetry should be the language of the direct experience of life, expressed in a truly Korean diction inherited from its guardians among the simple rural communities, who had preserved a powerful oral idiom that owed nothing to books and education.

So Chong-ju and a new beginning

One topic that this paper cannot go into is the relationship between the way poetry is received in its moment of origin and how it is perceived in later translations like those I and others now make into English. Suffice it to say that virtually all the main stream of poetry in modern South Korea derives from the early lyrics of So Chong Ju. There is no way a simple translation can begin to suggest the impact of a poem like "Self-portrait" on Korean poetry from the moment of its publication in October 1935:

Dad was a menial. He wasn't home even late at night.
Only old Gran was around, like a leek's roots
and a flowering jujube tree.
For months Ma craved just to eat one green apricot. . .
And Ma's son, black-nailed under a tiny lamp in a mud wall.
Some folks say I look like her dad:
the same mop of hair, his big eyes.
In the Year of Revolt Grandad went to sea
and never came back, the story goes.
What's raised me, then, these twenty-three years,
is the power of the wind, for eight parts in ten.
The world's course has yielded only shame;
some people have perceived a felon in my eyes,
others have perceived a fool in my mouth,
yet I'm certain there's nothing I need regret.

Even on mornings when day dawned in splendour,
the poetic dew anointing my brow
has always been mingled with drops of blood;
I've come through life in sunshine and shadows
like a sick dog panting, its tongue hanging out.

Equally, the Confucian tradition leads to the institutional monumentalization of certain poems through their elevation to school textbook pages as national poems. The need for simple poems with nationalistic messages has meant that generations of Korean school children learn one poem by So Chong Ju, invested with a symbolic nationalistic meaning that it may well not originally have had in the poet's mind:

For one chrysanthemum to bloom
the nightingale
must have sung like that since spring.

For one chrysanthemum to bloom
the thunder
must have rolled like that in pitch black clouds.

Chrysanthemum! You look like my sister
standing before her mirror, just back
from far away, far away byways of youth,
where she was racked with longing and lack.

For your yellow petals to bloom
the frost must have come down like that last night
and I was not even able to get to sleep.

In 1941, when Japan had sent thousands of Korean soldiers to fight its war and thousands of Korean girls to comfort its fighting men in camp brothels, the Korean language was again banned. By the time the war ended, fine poets had died in prison (Yun Dong-ju, Yi Yuk-sa). Until the end, the images of their poems concealed to all but Korean readers a fierce longing for a return of their national identity free of the Japanese yoke, as in these, their most famous works:


July's the month when green grapes ripen
Back in my village at home.
The village legend ripens in clusters
The dreaming sky settles on each grape.
A white-sailed boat will come drifting by
As the sea bares its bosom to the sky
And the longed-for guest will at last arrive
His weary limbs wrapped all in green.
With a feast of grapes I'll welcome him
Happy with dripping hands.
Quickly, prepare the dishes, lad,
White cloth on a silver tray.
(Yi Yuk-sa)

Until I breathe my last breath
I wish to face my sky without shame.
Even a wind blowing on leaves
Has left me restless.
With a heart singing hymns to the stars
I shall love all that must die.
And I shall walk diligently
Upon the path assigned to me.

Tonight again, the stars are blown by the wind.
(Yun Dong-ju, trans. Sung-il Lee)