Translator’s Note: Three Poems by Ko Un

A recent article in The Korea Times comments, “If there is a national poet, it may well be Ko Un.” The intersection of personal and national history, in his case, is both ordinary and extraordinary. As a boy growing up in North Chŏlla province during the Japanese occupation, Ko Un was ordered to change his name to Dakkabayai Doraske, and had to learn Korean in secret from a local farmhand because the language had been outlawed. When he was a teenager, the Korean War broke out. Drafted, but rejected for combat because he was too thin (malnourished), he worked unloading munitions and loading corpses for burial, sometimes carrying them on his back. At one point, he poured acid into both ears, so he would not hear the sounds of killing and dying. (His hearing was further damaged decades later, when he was tortured in prison as a political dissident.) In an interview in The Guardian, he recalls: “Half of my generation died. And I survived. So there was a sense of guilt, of culpability, at being a survivor. They had all died, and here I was, still alive.”

In 1952, before the war ended, Ko became a Buddhist monk. “Without Buddhism,” he says of that time in his life, “I wouldn’t be here today, because I was lost.” After a decade of monastic life, he left to become a schoolteacher on Cheju-do, an island south of the mainland. He was deeply affected by a Japanese translation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s novel, And Quiet Flows the Don (the encounter across nations and generations is typical) — so deeply, in fact, that he burned all his own work as unworthy. By his own account, he spent the next decade as drunk as possible. (“Sixty billion cells, / all drunk!” he jokes in a later poem.) On one occasion, he downed drink after drink, intending to drown himself, but he passed out instead. His fourth suicide attempt in 1970, when he swallowed sleeping pills, left him in a coma for thirty hours while the doctors pumped his stomach. Afterward he would say that his hand was a hand from the world beyond.

Then, in 1970, I read how a young worker set himself on fire and killed himself in the struggle for human rights, for workers’ rights.  I had wanted to die, tried to die, and reading that account I compared the death I had been dreaming of with that young man’s death. . . . I began to go into the streets, in demonstrations against the regime, so of course I ended up in prison.

Ko became an activist in the South Korean pro-democracy movement, was arrested several times, tortured, and sentenced to life in solitary confinement. During his years in prison, he tried to remember every human face he had ever encountered. This was the genesis of 만인보 (Maninbo), or Ten Thousand Lives, a work in thirty volumes, his attempt to recall everyone he had ever known, no matter how briefly.

After his early release, as part of a general pardon, Ko married Lee Sang-Wha, a professor of English literature. It would be another decade before the government would grant him a passport to travel abroad. Since then, he has taught at Harvard and Berkeley, among other places, and given readings all over the world. He has written more than one hundred and fifty books and, at age 81, shows no signs of slowing down. Choi Won-Shik observes, in the most concise contextualization of Ko Un’s place in postwar South Korean literary history: “The unique space where anti-traditional modernism and anti-Western traditionalism meet is where the poetry of Ko Un originates.” Anti-Western or not, critical reception of his work in the West has been warm. Gary Snyder notes that Ko Un is not only “playful and demotic, / Zen-silly, real-life deep,” but also a “post-Zen” poet of “daily country and small-town life,” “complexly situated, totally contemporary.” Robert Hass writes that “Ko Un is a remarkable poet and one of the heroes of human freedom in this half century, a religious poet who got tangled by accident in the terrible accidents of modern history.  But he is somebody who has been equal to the task, a feat rare among human beings.”

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Korean critics sometimes refer to Ko Un as “the Ko Uns,” because of his many voices, his restless self-reinvention. These four poems are in no way representative of his development as a poet, let alone his range or variousness; they were selected by Poetry from the dozen versions we had completed, which we chose to translate without regard for “representativeness” — they were simply the poems we loved most. Within the context of his oeuvre, these four were originally published in 2006, 2011, 1991 and 1986, respectively, in the quiet years after he had been released from prison, married, and moved with his wife to a village in the country. They don’t include poems in his essayistic or historical-epic or political-prophetic modes, or his verse-narratives based on ancient legend, folk-tale, or local gossip. They don’t reflect the full spectrum of his sensibility, especially his humor, his eye for the complexity and contradictions of human character, his affinity for common creatures (mosquitoes, dayflies, fleas, pigs, dogs, cows), his wonder at being alive.

But even in this brief selection, you can see how one of “the Ko Uns” is a poet of the liminal: drawn not so much to visible thresholds as auditory ones — the edges of sound and silence, word and world — which then widen to meditations on this world and other worlds, the living and the dead, the ephemeral and the eternal. His relation to hearing, and silence, may be more complicated than that of most American poets, partly for reasons mentioned above. In the “Author’s Preface” to 순간의  꽃 (Flowers of a Moment), he speaks of “the sound of that soundlessness which we call the stillness that is nirvana.” His inquiries are steeped in Buddhist spirituality — questions of self and no-self, desire and the emptying-out of desire, asking and asking-of and being-asked-of — but not in any conventional way, despite his years as a monk. He writes: “The nirvana I dream of is not so much a nirvana where there is nothing remaining as a nirvana where there is no staying. The present is the splendor of a moment on the move between unlimited past and unlimited future.”

There is much more to Ko Un than you’ll find here, so we urge you to look up some of the fifty books that have been translated into twenty-five languages, twelve into English alone, by a host of hard-working translators: Clare You and Richard Silberg, Sunny Jung and Hillel Schwartz, David McCann, Kevin O’Rourke, and especially Brother Anthony of Taizé, who has co-translated several volumes of Ko Un’s poetry and prose, first with the late Young-moo Kim, then with Kim and Gary Gach, and most recently, with Ko Un’s wife, Lee Sang-Wha. (The prose quotes in the previous paragraph were co-translated by him, Kim, and Gach.)

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Michael Scammell, commenting on Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Quiet Don (which had such a powerful effect on Ko Un in Japanese translation as And Quiet Flows the Don), writes: “The greater the original, the more translations it can bear.” Major writers deserve multiple translations and versions, to carry-across different possibilities in the original work, or emphasize different threads of thought — if only to reach as many readers as possible, and deepen the conversation between nations and generations. (Osip Mandelstam: “A poet’s translators are complementary, not competitive.”)

These versions weren’t intended to be strict translations. Since all four poems have previously been translated into English, and in the case of the fourth, also reprinted in a widely used textbook (The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry, edited by David McCann), we felt that stricter, more scholarly translations of the same originals already exist, and we could be freer, looser in our versions. We wanted them to work as poems in English. If readers want to find more of Ko Un’s work, after reading these versions, then that would be the greatest reward for what is, in the end, a labor of love.

A note about attributions: the Poetry editors wouldn’t let us print “translated and adapted from the Korean” (“Our concept of translation is very broad”), but we decided that our first three versions are close enough to their originals to remain identified as Ko Un’s. We’ve included a rough “literal” translation of the first poem below, so you can see how relatively close our final versions remain, despite the liberties taken:

1. “Ear” (Full of Shame, 2006)

[this world] [over]

[different] [world] [from] [someone] [is coming]

[night] [rain] [sound]

[someone] [that world] [to] [going] [surely/certainly/definitely] [meet] [will]

As you can see, syntax poses the largest problem, but not the only one. You’ll also notice there’s no punctuation in the original poem, no distinction between uppercase or lowercase letters, few articles or prepositions. And how to carry-across the specific music of Korean into English, or any language into another, when each has its own vowels, consonantal textures, rhythms, tones, duration, and affect? In particular, there’s no way to convey the sounds of the hinge-line adequately: 밤빗소리 (“night” “rain” “sound,” transliterated as bahm-beet-sori). You lose the alliteration, the crackling consonants, the strong beats, and the near-homophone of “빗” (“rain,” transliterated as beet, the tongue landing as lightly as possible on the terminal t) and “beat,” like a pun across languages. (Incidentally, we’re not sure about “hiss,” since it emphasizes the sibilance of rain over the totality of its sound (rhythm, volume, etc.), and introduces associations not in the original, interesting as they are — but on the other hand, it’s more evocative than the more accurate, but duller, “sound.” We may change our minds tomorrow, and render this line as: “Night-rain beating.”)

To make the English sound idiomatic and natural, not awkward or lifeless, and then to “translate” the translation into a true poem, one that enacts the motions of the mind — the rhythms of thinking-through-time and feeling-through-time, their velocity, their leaps; the placement and duration of silences, the torque of line against sentence: are these translatable? We don’t know. But you can see what some of our decisions were: adding periods to indicate the length of the pause between thoughts; dividing the long last line into two lines and two sentences for pacing and clarity; simplifying the grammar, very slightly, into declarative constructions to sharpen the “attack,” as musicians would say, and to reflect both the demotic diction and the conviction of Ko Un’s voice. We were trying not only to shape the lines, but also the silence between the lines, so the reader could hear the silence particular to this poem, the silence out of which and against which words were spoken.

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The diction of Ko Un’s poems is relatively colloquial, compared to other South Korean poets of similar stature, such as So Chong-ju. For a translator, this poses another problem: what sounds plainspoken, stark, even elemental in the original can sound bland, flat, and colorless in English, like eating a Styrofoam sandwich.

With “Taklamakan Desert,” we tried to “translate” the translation towards greater spareness. We decided to leave out minor adjectives and phrases (“immense/tremendous/extreme,” “endless/boundless,” etc.) that sounded unnecessary in English, already implied by the words around them.  We translated “명사도  동사도  다” (“all nouns and verbs”) as “all words,” which sounds less awkward in English, and decided not to isolate “there” (“거기”) on its own line, the way it’s isolated in the original, since it would sound overemphatic in English, especially as an ending.  We added “in the Taklamakan Desert” in the penultimate line, for music, and “the silence of” in the last line, for rhythm, so that the last line becomes a line of iambic pentameter, a structural counterpoint to “the cry” in the second stanza, but only because silence is central to Ko Un’s work.  (We could have rendered the last two lines more literally: “There —/ someone’s thousand-year-old skull.” — and again, may change our minds tomorrow.) 

These are musical or poetic decisions, not scholarly ones, and some of them would be unacceptable to some (most?) translators. Robert Lowell, in his preface to Imitations, writes: “Boris Pasternak has said the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone.” (He also called the point-for-point translator, memorably, a “taxidermist.”) Mandelstam criticized translations that were “excessively accurate” or “academic,” and emphasized the “secret hearing” (maybe kin to T.S. Eliot’s “auditory imagination”) that a poet, and therefore a poem, must have. In the end, we translated for tone, for that sense of “secret hearing.” Hopefully we’ve carried-across enough of Ko Un’s voice so that the reader can hear it hearing, not just speaking: its obsessive repetitions, its self-accusation, its moving renunciation of word and world.

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In the case of “Rice-Field Road at Dusk,” it departs too much from the original to be called a “Ko Un poem” — it’s more of a Lowellian “imitation”— so in discussion with the Poetry editors, we transferred the authorial attribution entirely, and added “after Ko Un” as the epigraph. This translator’s note is way too long, several pages over the editors’ suggested length, so we weren't able to include our other literal translations, or to specify every departure and every reason for it. Instead, we’ll end with the ending. The original asks: what is the rice “if not adult”  (“어른이  아니고  무어냐”), before ending with the notion of “one nation” (“한  나라”). Our adaptation, by leaving out the last three lines of the original, and substituting “alive” for “adult,” emphasizes a different thread of Ko Un’s thought: the notion of one life, or the Buddhist belief in the interconnectedness of all being (동체대비), which is present everywhere in Ko Un’s work.

Joseph Brodsky once wrote, “In the work of a good writer we always hear a dialogue of the spheres with the gutter. If it doesn’t destroy [him]…, this schism is precisely what creates a writer, whose job therefore becomes making his pen catch up with his soul.” Our pens, in English, are still trying to catch up with Ko Un’s soul.