BTS’ ‘Spring Day’ lyrics win praise from Korean literary critic

Yim Hun-young, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, speaks during an interview at his home in Seocho District, Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

"No matter what kind of writing one does, even a revolution must be stylish and beautiful to succeed," says Yim Hun-young, a literary critic who has spent much of his life fighting for Korea’s historical memory.

The 85-year-old, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, says beauty is not a luxury or an escape, but rather what allows literature, resistance and even revolution to endure.

That conviction reveals a different side of a figure long associated with activism and historical reckoning. Yim led the Center for Historical Truth and Justice for more than 20 years and helped compile the "Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators," work that hardened his public image as a veteran activist. In an interview at his home in Seoul’s Seocho District on Wednesday, however, he made an unexpected case for beauty.

Yim Hun-young, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, looks through “The Road of Literature, the Square of History,” an autobiographical record based on conversations with literary critic Yoo Sung-ho, at his home in Seocho District, Seoul, Wednesday. The book traces Yim’s life from childhood through his two imprisonments and his tenure as head of the Center for Historical Truth and Justice. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

The idea, he said, grew from prison. Yim was jailed twice in the 1970s, experiences that made him realize how urgently human beings need beauty. Behind bars, he found comfort in works he said he would ordinarily have ignored, including aesthetic literature. He read Junichiro Tanizaki, a master of the genre, and Oscar Wilde, who believed beauty was the only value.

"No matter how painful reality was and no matter how hungry I was, I learned then that beauty gives such joy and hope, and how great a comfort it is to human beings," Yim said.

Yim repeatedly returned to one sentence. "Beauty is an eternal truth," he said.

For Yim, that belief does not contradict his lifelong dedication to committed literature and realism.

"Look at Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection 'The Flowers of Evil,'" he said, citing it as an example of how aesthetic vision can feed resistance.

"The eye that sees flowers in evil, in other words, the purest form of aestheticism, is there. Baudelaire took a rifle and went out into the streets to fight during the February Revolution of 1848. Where did that power come from? Did it not begin from his own literary beauty and move on to resisting dictatorship and overthrowing monarchical rule?" he said.

Yim marks the 60th anniversary of his literary debut this year, and literature remains his true field. He invoked the Confucian ideal of the noble scholar, or "gunja," while reflecting on how critics have received him.

Yim took office in January as the third director of the National Museum of Korean Literature. He became the oldest chief of any ministry-affiliated institution, a post he says gives him a platform to show how aesthetic sensitivity can lead toward peace and human equality. He has presented "prismatic literature" and "rainbow-like peace" as the museum’s mission. He does not use the phrases decoratively; they define how he believes literature should help readers confront history.

"Niagara Falls is so beautiful not because the water powerfully falls down, but because one can see a rainbow as it falls," Yim said. "A waterfall without a rainbow has no beauty. It is just a natural phenomenon. To make people have eyes that can find a rainbow even while looking at the waterfall, that turbulent history — that is literature and art."

Yim Hun-young, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, poses in front of bookshelves in his study at his home in Seocho District, Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

Then Yim turned to BTS. He said he watched the K-pop supergroup's comeback concert at Gwanghwamun Square on TV. Yim compared BTS with singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, who became the first musician to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

"Just as Bob Dylan, who sang of peace, became the first popular musician to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016, BTS also fully has the qualifications to win a Nobel Prize," Yim said.

He then recited a line from BTS’ "Spring Day."

"How much yearning must fall like snow before that spring day comes?" he said. "The lyrics are so poetic that I marveled after hearing the song. There has been no one in human literary history who wrote such a poem."

Yim’s praise of BTS was not an offhand comment. He placed the group’s lyrics inside a wider claim that Korean literature and Korean-language expression have reached a world-class level. He said modern and contemporary Korean literature ranks among the world’s best. Park Kyong-ni’s "Land," Choi In-hun’s "Hwadu," Jo Jung-rae’s "Taebaek Mountain Range" and Hwang Sok-yong’s "Jang Gilsan," he said, are enduring masterpieces in world literature.

He also named Lee Byung-ju’s relatively lesser-known "Jirisan" as required reading for politicians. His praise was admiring but not uncritical.

"To avoid persecution for his writing, anti-communist ideology is laid throughout the work and the United States is not mentioned at all, so there are aspects that are wise yet cowardly," Yim said. "But Lee Byung-ju is a great writer who dealt with our modern history outstandingly while encompassing both the left and the right."

K-pop boy band BTS performs during the Tokyo leg of the group's "ARIRANG" world tour at Tokyo Dome. Courtesy of BigHit Music

Yim’s confidence in Korean literature comes from a life that has tracked Korea’s modern upheavals. He was born in 1941 in a remote mountain village in Uiseong County, North Gyeongsang Province. Before he entered school, he first encountered written characters through the foundational Chinese primer "Thousand Character Classic." At age 9, he experienced the Korean War.

After graduating from Andong Normal School, he worked for two years as an elementary school teacher. During that period, he read the ancient Chinese military classic "The Art of War" and Carl von Clausewitz’s "On War," one of the central texts of military theory.

He moved to Seoul in 1961 to attend university, joining the cohort that entered school in the year of the May 16 military coup. He gave up creative writing early, but made his name when an essay on Choi In-hun that he wrote as a university freshman appeared in a school magazine. In 1966, while in graduate school, he made his literary debut through the magazine "Hyundae Munhak."

The decades that followed brought surveillance and imprisonment. Yim became implicated in the 1974 writers’ spy ring case and the 1979 South Korean National Liberation Front Preparation Committee case. He lived for years as a person under state surveillance. He had his rights formally restored in 1998 and was acquitted in 2018.

Yim Hun-young, director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, works on the manuscript for the second volume of “A History of Literary Persecution in Modern Korea” in his study at his home in Seocho District, Seoul, Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

From 2003 until just before taking office as museum director, he led the Center for Historical Truth and Justice. The "Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators," compiled during his tenure, remains his signature achievement.

Yim said he is proud of the dictionary but carries one regret.

"However, not writing a book on pro-Japanese collaboration as I saw it in my own way remains a regret," he said.

During his three-year term at the museum, Yim said he plans to turn his attention outward through three major projects. He wants to build solidarity among Korean diaspora writers around the world who write in local languages. He intends to form a network of Korean literature researchers and create a foundation for cooperation with the museum.

He plans to highlight foreign writers who have written about Korea. One example is U.S. novelist Pearl S. Buck, whose 1963 novel "The Living Reed" traces four generations of Korean national history from the late Joseon period to liberation.

Yim said the goal is to preserve Korean literature while bringing it to a global audience.

"As diaspora writers, researchers, foreign writers and the literature museum build close relationships, we will elevate Korean literature on the global stage," he said. "Now is the time when we must think not only of Korean readers, but readers around the world."

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.