Ko Un [South Korea]

 

201
 
A mouse listens to a scops owl’s cry.
By day
a dog with nothing else to do listens to a calf lowing.
 
I listen to Uighurs talking.
While coming from
far away,
far away,
from that unbounded place
on the western shore of Qinghai Lake,
meaning having vanished,
only the sounds remain.
 
I listen to ethnic Koreans’ Chinese.
I listen to English.
I listen to British English
and Californian English respectively.
In the state where meaning is nullified
only the sacredness of sounds remains.
 
Meanings,
interpretations,
truths that are this planet’s catastrophes,
you’ve worked hard for thousands of years.
Now be off with you.
 
Farewell.
 
I listen to your words
as the call of a goose by night,
only as the fossils of sounds
as a snail
or a butterfly listens to my words.
 
Meaningless consonants and vowels!
Reality in the origin, sounds !
 
(from “Untitled Poems”)
 
 
 
I Will Sing
 
I will sing.
When I suffer pain
I will sing with pain,
when I am joyous
I will sing with joy.
 
I will sing and sing
under the blue sky
like the sound of someone’s flute twenty thousand years before,
like the fossil of sound of someone’s flute buried twenty thousand years later.
Far,
far,
I will sing.
 
I will sing for about forty thousand years.
I will sing, I will sing
until the day when a daffodil
is no longer a daffodil,
until songs are no longer songs.
 
 
 
Regarding Similes 
 
When we call something a shit
I feel sorry for shit.
When we call someone fox-like
I feel sorry for foxes.
When we call someone viper’s breed
I feel sorry for vipers
and their ancestors.
When we call someone dog-like
I feel sorry for dogs
and dogs yet to be born.
When we call someone a rat,
when Kim Jae-Gyu
called Cha Ji-Cheol a worm,
I feel sorry for rats
and worms.
When we call someone a hyena, a wolf,
I feel sorry for them
and their Tanzanian grasslands.
I feel sorry for so-called weeds.
I feel sorry for stones and rocks
when they are compared with jade.
When we say Hell and its glowing fire and brimstone
I feel sorry for what lies under the ground.
 
Language is already its own sin.
 
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Ko Un is widely acknowledged to be Korea’s foremost contemporary writer. Ko Un is a poet, an essayist, a novelist, a translator, and a literary critic, with an immense literary achievement consisting of nearly 170 books. Ko Un was born in 1933 in South Korea. He began to write poems at an early age. During the horrors of the Korean War (1950-3) he went through a mental breakdown and made his first attempt at suicide, which was followed by another four attempts over the next 20 years. Before the end of the war he joined a Buddhist monastery and became a monk. For the next decade he practised intense Seon meditation and traveled throughout the country.  In 1957 he founded the “Buddhist Newspaper” and began to publish poems, essays, and novels. In 1962, being already widely known as a poet and having served as head monk of several major temples, he left the Buddhist community after publishing a ‘Resignation Manifesto.’ During the period 1963-1966 he isolated himself in Jeju Island, founding a charity school, teaching Korean and art, writing most beautiful symbolist poems, suffering from severe insomnia and alcohol abuse. 1n 1967-1973, now back in Seoul, while dedicating himself thoroughly to nihilism, he produced many works. In 1973 he was awakened to the reality of his country by the self-immolation of an uneducated laborer and became engaged in political and social activities opposing the military regime, also joining the struggle for human rights and the labour movement. After the formation of the Association of Writers for Practical Freedom in 1974, he became its first secretary general. During 1974-1982 he was, many times and for long periods, persecuted by KCIA with arrests, house arrests, detentions, tortures, and imprisonments. In 1980 he was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment. After serving two and a half years, he was set free in a general pardon. With his marriage in 1983 began a time of  productivity unparalleled in the history of Korean literature—one critic has called it an “explosion of poetry”. Ko Un was elected Chairman of the Association of the Writers for National Literature and honoured as a resident professor of the graduate school, Kyong-gi University. He was a visiting research scholar at the Yenching Institute of Harvard University and UC, Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at Seoul National University for 5 years and the President of the Compilation Committee of the Grand Inter-Korean Dictionary for 10 years.He has received many prestigious literary awards in Korea; and his books have been translated into more than 35 Asian and European languages and he has been acclaimed as one of the most important poets of the world. A complete list of Ko’s honours as well as his works is available at www.koun.co.kr For the books he has written since 2023, see https://gnyang.co.kr