First bilingual edition brings poet Kim Yeong-nang to new readers

"A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever," the first Korean-English bilingual edition of poet Kim Yeong-nang's complete oeuvre, translated by Brother Anthony / Courtesy of Hajun Books

There is a saying in Korea: “In the North, we have Kim So-wol; in the South, we have Kim Yeong-nang.” The two stand as twin pillars of the country’s lyric poetry, their work still shaping the emotional landscape of modern Korean verse.

Kim Yeong-nang (1903-50) left behind just 86 poems, written over the course of his 47-year life before it was cut short at the dawn of the 1950-53 Korean War. Last month, those writings found new life in the first Korean-English bilingual edition of his complete works.

“A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever,” translated by the veteran scholar Brother Anthony, places the original Korean poems alongside their English renderings. Read side by side, they invite the reader to experience Kim’s signature musicality as it moves from one language to another.

To trace how Brother Anthony first came to translate the poems, one must go back nearly two decades.

“Kim Hyeon-cheol, the poet’s son, arrived in my office 20 years ago,” he told The Korea Times. “He had come back to Korea (after a long exile in the United States) hoping to find somebody who would translate the poems of his father.”

It was no simple task. Much of Kim’s work, written in Korean under Japanese colonial rule, is steeped in the local vocabulary and dialect of his hometown, Gangjin, South Jeolla Province. Complicating matters further, multiple editions of the poems had appeared over the years, often with subtle differences in the text.

His translations were eventually published in 2010 by a small, fledgling press in the U.S. But with little publicity and virtually no distribution, the book passed quietly from the public’s notice. Before long, it went out of print.

Years later, a turning point arrived when Brother Anthony met Choi Sung-hoon, head of Hajun Books. Choi assembled an editor who meticulously compared the various Korean editions to establish an authoritative text, then returned to Brother Anthony’s early translations and combed through them line by line for errors.

“I’m very happy with the result, because I knew there were mistakes — things I hadn’t understood properly at the time,” the translator said. “So this, I would say, is the first real edition.”

Poet Kim Yeong-nang / Korea Times file

Beyond the lyrical beauty of Kim’s poems, Brother Anthony reflected on the man himself. “I admired Kim Yeong-nang also for his life history.”

Throughout the years of Japanese colonial rule, the poet lived in quiet defiance. He wore his hair long, continued to dress in traditional hanbok and refused to adopt a Japanese name for himself or his children.

Music was central to his life. He would invite the young pansori (Korean narrative music) master Kim So-hee to his home to sing, accompanying her on the drum. At the same time, he was deeply drawn to Western classical music; his house was filled with records, and when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed in Tokyo, he sold a plot of farmland to pay for the trip to Japan.

After Korea’s liberation, however, his family background as a landowner led some on the left to label him an “enemy of the people” amid the country’s ideological turmoil. Forced to leave his hometown of Gangjin, he relocated to Seoul. There, during the Korean War, he was killed by a stray shell as Seoul came under bombardment.

“Previously, I only really knew Kim’s best-known poem, ‘Until Peonies Bloom,’” said Choi, the publisher. “But reading his work more closely, I was struck by how musical they are. He chose to write almost entirely in pure Hangeul. I realized how beautifully he captured the rhythm and texture of the Korean language, and that’s when I decided this collection had to be published.”

The book is currently available only in Korea, but Choi is in discussions to donate copies to major institutions, libraries and Korean studies centers overseas with the aim of bringing Korean poetry closer to a wider international readership.

The publisher said he sees this book as a possible starting point for a series, noting that Brother Anthony has already brought a number of other Korean poets into English.