Korean poetry
I’ve been asked to write a book on Korean poetry. Do you think I should? I do not know Korean poetry well, but I do know what I like, and I have had several impactful experiences that have informed me of the power of poetry.
The first experience came when I was at a banquet in San Francisco on the heels of a day-long conference. Sitting across from me was a businessman who was supporting the conference, but who was not an academic. It was clear from his conversation that he did not understand the academic issues being discussed at the conference. But as a financial supporter of the event, he was interested in talking to me.
He asked who I was and where I was from. The banquet was attended mostly by Korean Americans — I was one of only three Caucasians in the room. The businessman sitting across the table from me asked about my position. I told him I taught Korean history and literature at Brigham Young University in Utah. Though I said “history and literature,” he picked up on the literature part and asked what I taught. I responded "hyangga," "sijo," "gasa" and folk tales in my premodern course and modern poetry, short stories and novels in my modern course. He said, “You know sijo?”
I thought it funny that of all the things I mentioned, he jumped on sijo. I said yes, that I like sijo very much. He asked if I could recite one. I said certainly, and in Korean I recited the famous sijo by Jeong Mong-ju, who refused to support the new Joseon Dynasty in 1388 and paid for his refusal with his life.
I said:
Though I die, and die, again, though I die one hundred deaths,
After my bones have turned to dust, whether my soul lives on or not,
My red heart, forever loyal to my Lord, will never fade away.
Have you ever been in a noisy setting when softly, quietly, something happens and the quiet ripples across the room till everyone is listening to whatever broke the chatter. It was one of those moments. Halfway through I could sense that my voice and the poem were taking over the noisy banquet hall. By the time I finished, my voice was the only sound in the room.
That experience taught me the power of poetry. I don’t know why I had that poem in my brainbox, but it was there, and I recited it. I have memorized a few poems in my life and my father and grandmother used to talk about memorizing poems. And there it was.
There was one other event where a poem took over the room. This was a classroom and I was teaching the way I always did, and the subject that day was poetry. I had assigned as homework a particular poem, an assignment I usually gave every year when I taught that class. It was always interesting to me that a short poem, even a three-line sijo, when translated can carry a variety of meanings and nuances, such that every year, every time we translated that poem, there was a variety of translation.
And that was the case that time, that year. I called on several students to read their translation of the Korean poem we were looking at. There were the usual varieties of nuance and interpretation of the poem. Then it happened!
One student read his translation. Everyone in the class of about 30 knew that same poem. They had all translated it. But this time is was different. The nuance, the choice of words, the feeling of this translation was different. And every knew it. After the student read his version of the poem, the classroom fell oddly silent, for an awkward moment. Then softly one student, then another, then the whole class applauded that poem. There was something about the way the student had translated it that spoke to everyone in the room. It was as if they were all saying, yes, somehow I felt that, too, but I couldn’t express that feeling the way you just did.
I was dumbfounded. I didn’t say anything for a while. I knew this was one of those moments — one where time stood still. A moment that a teacher lives for. Where something special, something that had never happened before, had just happened. That student, that translation, captured everyone in the room. They all knew it, that student had captured the feeling of that poem. Everyone knew this was not a mundane, routine exercise in writing. Everyone knew that the poem, the translation, the feeling at that moment was transcending.
Since then, I’ve longed for, and hoped for, the magic to appear again. Whenever I give a lecture, I try to work a poem into the presentation. And sometimes there is magic. Sometimes in the middle of a lecture about Korean history or something, I recite a poem and it breaks the “fourth wall” — it lifts the presentation out of the mundane, and everyone applauds. It happens often. Poetry is magic. I’ve learned that. And I love to see it happen. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it’s magic.
Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.