Ko Un describes encounters with 10,000 people in new 'Maninbo'

Poet Ko Un is busy at work in his home in Anseong, Gyeonggi Province in this undated photo. / Korea Times file

By Choi Yearn-hong

Ko Un is the most famous Korean poet and has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the past several years. "Maninbo: Ten Thousand Lives," about 10,000 people he met or knew in his life, may be his best-known poetry book.

The book, translated by Brother Anthony and Lee Sang-wha, is composed collection of 212 select poems from the 11th to 20th books in the Maninbo series. Ko conceived the idea for this poetry book while in his prison cell in 1980. He was freed when President Park Chung-hee was killed, only to be imprisoned again soon after for "rebellion" by Gen. Chun Doo-hwan. It was during his time in prison that he decided to produce the series.

I have not read the Ten Thousand Lives, but I have read "Maninbo: Peace and War," which I review here. I thought that "Peace and War" would describe Ko's many encounters during the Korean War (1950-1953), the severe poverty after the war and the reconstruction that followed in the 1950s and the 1960s. At the time, he was a young monk. In the 1960s, he returned from the Buddhist temple to the secular world.

I guessed wrong. The book contains poems about good and bad kings, princes and royal court bureaucrats; and a host of other well-known and not so well-known figures in Korean history, from monks and admirals to independence fighters and their broken families to criminals and prostitutes. So, this poetry book's subtitle, "Peace and War," is somewhat misleading, because it does not write about these people in any chronological order.

"Maninbo: Peace & War" by Ko Un

However, a great majority of the poems were about the Korean War and post-war South Korea. Peace and war are the bases of many epic stories, including those told in this book. A couple of poems talk about well-known families torn apart by the Korean War, such as Dr. Jang Gi-ryeo and his wife (page 53) and Won Byeong-o and his father (page 62). Jang came to the South and practiced family medicine, a Korean Dr. Schweitzer who took care of the poor and disadvantaged in Pusan all his life without remarrying (he left his first wife in the North). Won came to the South and became a college professor and a famous bird watcher. He sent his bird with a tag of his name to his father in the North. In turn, his father sent him back the bird with another tag. The father and son could not communicate through conventional means owing to the serious divide on the peninsula. According to Won, who is also a poet, the National Security Law banned more than those greetings between fathers and sons who are separated in the two Koreas.

One poem, "Ortega Kim," (pages 126-127) was about a North Korean soldier who was captured as a prisoner of war, chose to live in India, moved to Mexico and finally settled down in Cuba. He completely forgot the Korean language but still remembers his mother in the North, wearing a white blouse and a black skirt. The stories in each poem can be expanded into novels.

This poetry book does not ask who really divided the country and who started the war. It does not favor either side. The poetry's subject was not North Korea but rather the South's miserable human conditions on the war-torn peninsula. Ko considers South Korea's anti-communism hilarious. He repeatedly points out the severe poverty but does not see the miracle in the South's economic development and political modernization. This may be the topic of his next Maninbo book.

Ko is well-known for his political confrontations with South Korea's authoritarian military rule in the 1970s and 1980s, which are detailed in his poems, along with his political comrades, Kim Geun-tae (page 54), Jei Jeong-gu (page 55), Yun Han-bong (page 56) and Seo Gyeong-suk (page 57). One poem talks about a French woman, Colette, whose Korean name is No Jeong-hye and who fought for Ko's political freedom and other human rights issues (page 50). He wrote poems about the police officers who interrogated him and watched him in prison. He also wrote poems about a laborer who burned himself while demanding improvements in the minimum wage and workers' rights in the 1970s, and other workers who protested governmental policies suppressing workers' rights at the time.

His poems inspired a series of student revolts against the final military rule before 1987. He was proud of his poem "Arrow," which inspired people to bring down the authoritarian rule and establish a democracy. However, he is still silent on the three generations of North Korean dictatorship, even though he has been to the country while accompanying South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's first visit to Pyongyang in June 2000. He has since traveled to North Korea as a poet and a state guest a few more times.

People might wonder about his silence on the North Korean dictatorship. They might think as a poet, he should be more vocal about the oppressive regime, a regime that does not have a place on earth, and its crimes against humanity. They believe he should have launched a democratization movement for North Korea during or after his visit to the country. Or he should have at least declared "North Korea is hopeless, so I am silent about it."

Like many people, I ask myself, "What is the poet's role? Should the poet be vocal about his or her social and political stance?"

I may find the answers in the next Maninbo book. I really hope I do.

Dr. Choi is the founding president of the Korean Poets' Group based in Washington.