Ko Un, South Korea
The Poems
The Whisper
Rain falls.
I sit at my desk.
The desk quietly says:
Once I was a flower, was a leaf, was a stalk.
I was a long root beneath the ground
that stretched as far as yonder desert oasis
A scrap of iron on the desk says:
I was the uvula of a wolf wailing alone on moonlit nights.
The rain stops.
I go outside.
Thoroughly soaked grass says to me:
Once I was your feelings of joy and sorrow.
I was your lives and your songs.
I was your dreams.
Now I say
to desk
to iron
to earth:
Once I was you, was you, was you.
Now I am you, I am you.
*
그 속삭임
비가 오다
책상 앞에 앉다
책상이 가만히 말하다
나는 일찍이 꽃이었고 잎이었다 줄기였다
나는 사막 저쪽 오아시스까지 뻗어간
땅 속의 긴 뿌리였다
책상 위의 쇠토막이 말하다
나는 달밤에 혼자 울부짖는 늑대의 목젖이었다
비가 그치다
밖으로 나가다
흠뻑 젖은 풀이 나에게 말하다
나는 일찍이 너희들의 희로애락이었다
너희들의 삶이었고 노래였다
너희들의 꿈속이었다
이제 내가 말하다
책상에게
쇠에게
흙에게
나는 일찍이 너였다 너였다 너였다
지금 나는 너이고 너이다
* * *
A Certain Joy
What I am thinking now
is what someone else has already thought
somewhere in this world.
Don’t cry.
What I am thinking now
is what someone else is thinking now
somewhere in this world.
Don’t cry.
What I am thinking now
is what someone else is about to think
somewhere in this world.
Don’t cry.
How joyful it is
that I am composed of so many ‘I’s
in this world, somewhere in this world.
How joyful it is
that I am composed of so many others
Don’t cry.
*
어떤 기쁨
지금 내가 생각하고 있는 것은
세계의 어디선가
누가 생각했던 것
울지 마라
지금 내가 생각하고 있는 것은
세계의 어디선가
누가 생각하고 있는 것
울지 마라
지금 내가 생각하고 있는 것은
세계의 어디선가
누가 막 생각하려는 것
울지 마라
얼마나 기쁜 일인가
이 세계에서
이 세계의 어디에서
나는 수많은 나로 이루어졌다
얼마나 기쁜 일인가
나는 수많은 남과 남으로 이루어졌다
울지 마라
The Poet
Ko Un is widely acknowledged to be Korea’s foremost contemporary poet with an immense literary achievement of 160 books, out of which about 80 are poetry books, including monumental 30-volume Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives). Ko Un is often called Ko Uns instead of Ko Un by literary critics because of his incredible active volcano of productivity. Ko Un manifested an immense diversity; epigrams of a couple of lines, long discursive poems; epic; pastoral; and even a genre of poems he has himself created, which is termed popular-historical poem. Ko Un wants to make his entire life, even his grave, a poem, refusing himself to be imprisoned by the effort to write poetry as an end itself. That’s why most literary critics agree that his poems have attained the great liberation from the language. Ko Un has received dozens of prestigious literary awards and honours at home and abroad, and more than 80 volumes of translations of his work have been published in about 35 foreign languages, Oriental and Western.