The world of Maninbo is a world where unfamiliar relationships evolve between the poet, the speaking voice, and the subject being depicted or the action existing between the lines. An interpretation of human beings is possible in the process in which they establish inseparable, irreversible relationships. It is the never-ending life where you are I, I am you, and you are he or someone and that someone is another I…the movement of the world. The stage for the social cycle which begets the freedom of ‘I’ and others is the space of Maninbo. I, the author, cannot but be an alter ego of that ‘I’. Society is like that. Therefore, the distinction between good and evil, beautiful and ugly can be valid only when we get rid of the logic of one domination. Dream produces a cyclical ethics, like a snake biting its own tail.
Many years ago, a volume of English translations of poems selected from volumes 1 through 10 of Maninbo was published in the US. The present volume contains poems selected from volumes 11 through 20. The subjects of many of the poems in this volume are obtained from the traces of my experiences prior to and during the 1950s. They depict tragic scenes — situations of life and imminent death, the things that happened when traditional society collapsed, existence and ruins, incursion of ideology, migrations of population, a war that caused dehumanisation, and the possibility of humanity in that war. The ruins gave birth to what follows despair.
The portraits of Korean people gain universality in that they are not only portraits of Koreans but the portraits of human beings. My dream is that this volume, including poems that contain the situations and truth of an atrocious period on the Korean peninsula, will serve to offer the opportunity for us to reflect on the human world where wars have never ceased.
Uisang, the great Korean monk of ancient times, spread all over the Korean peninsula the Buddhist Huayan notion that ‘All is one, one is all’. 1500 years after him, my mind too opens its arms wide toward the fetal movement of a mote of dust and, on the largest scale, the grandiose action of the expansion of the universe.
KO UN
TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) is the title of a remarkable collection of poems by Ko Un, filling thirty volumes, a total of four thousand and one poems containing the names of 5600 people, which took 30 years to complete. Ko Un first conceived the idea while confined in a solitary cell upon his arrest in May 1980, the first volumes appeared in 1986, and the project was completed 25 years after publication began, in 2010. Robert Hass, former American Poet Laureate, who has also written a long essay on Maninbo, remarked on the completion of the huge project in 2010, ‘That poem, or the part of it that has moved and excited readers of the English translation, is a gift to the world, a stunning portrait of the 20th century in all its humanity and violence, and a tribute to the vitality of the Korean people.’ It is certainly hard to think of any other contemporary poet’s work which can rival Maninbo in its complexity, its sheer vitality, and its ability to cover so many aspects of a nation’s history. It becomes even more amazing when we remember the eighty other volumes of poetry and prose Ko Un published in the years during which he was working on Maninbo.
An earlier volume of translations in English published in the United States in 2005 contained some 160 poems from volumes 1 to 10 of Maninbo. This present volume contains poems from volumes 11 to 20. We hope that a third volume will offer poems from the last ten volumes.
The last half of this volume is selected from volumes 16 to 20 of Maninbo, which is focused on the sufferings of the Korean people during the Korean War. We have made our selections with consideration of how ordinary people suffer from warfare in a world that has, in recent times, never known a period without war. We have also considered what might be most accessible to readers unfamiliar with the events of Korean history.
Ko Un first conceived the Maninbo project while he was in prison after the military coup of May 1980. Languishing in solitary confinement in a military prison, unsure whether he might be executed or not, he found his mind filling with memories of the people he had met or heard of during his life. Finally, he made a vow that, if he was released from prison, he would write poems about each of them. In part this would be a means of rescuing from oblivion countless lives that would otherwise be lost, and also it would serve to offer a vision of the history of Korea as it has been lived by its entire population through the centuries. The poems are written in a particular style, created by Ko Un and named by him ‘popular-historical poetry’. Essentially narrative, each poem offers a brief glimpse of an individual’s life. Some span an entire existence, some relate a brief moment. Some are celebrations of remarkable lives, others recall terrible events and inhuman beings. Some poems are humorous, others are dark commemorations of unthinkable incidents. They span the whole of Korean history, from earliest pre-history to the present time.
We have tried to preserve the specific flavour of the Korean poems, which are free in structure, brief evocations, divided often into short sections, with snatches of dialogue, glimpses of events. We are very grateful to the American poet Hillel Schwartz for reading our translations and making insightful suggestions for poetic improvement. We have avoided overloading the poems with explanatory notes and assume that readers will consult a map of Korea if they wish to identify the many places named in the poems. The history of Korea, like its geography, is not well-known in the world at large. We hope that this collection will help many discover the tragic yet intensely human lives that so many Koreans have led, simply, nobly, often with immense dignity amidst a painful reality.
BROTHER ANTHONY OF TAIZÉ
& LEE SANG-WHA
A BRIEF SUMMARY OF KOREAN HISTORY
These poems contain so many references to Korean history, ancient and modern, that the reader will soon be looking for help. Explanations are best done in a separate general summary, rather than by multiple notes to individual poems.Ancient Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla, and Goryeo
Korea is today divided into South and North Korea, officially designated as the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, respectively. Together, they occupy the entire Korean Peninsula. This division is recent, the fruit of the Korean War. Historically, we find the peninsula divided into a number of distinct kingdoms at the start of the present era, but for many centuries the whole peninsula was a single nation. In the northern-most part, originally centred in and reaching far into what was later known as Manchuria, was Goguryeo. That kingdom, recorded as having been established in 37 BC, lasted as an independent entity until 669.
The southern border of Goguryeo slowly moved southward down the peninsula until it reached the region now occupied by Seoul. The western portion of southern Korea was governed by the kingdom known as Baekje, founded in 18 BC and independent until 660. Further south, the south-east portion of the peninsula was occupied by Silla, with its capital in the city now known as Gyeongju, where the dynasty was founded in 57 BC and continued as a kingdom until 918, starting as a local kingdom, then becoming an enlarged ‘Unified Silla’ integrating the Gaya kingdom in 532, Baekje in 660, and then Goguryeo in 668 with the military support of Tang China.