Three Poets of Modern Korea: Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon, and Choi Young-mi

by Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon, Choi Young-mi

As noted in the introduction, in contemporary Korea, "poems are found on mountain boulders, on café walls, on placemats, T-shirts, and television game shows." And though Americans may know something of Korea’s modern history of tumult—division and repression—little of the country’s rich and varied poetry has been available to the English-speaking public.

In Three Poets of Modern Korea, American poet James Kimbrell, and his wife, translator and native speaker Yu Jung-yul, have gathered and translated leading representatives of three generations of Korean poets. From the Dada and surrealist influenced work of Yi Sang, to the colloquial, affirming poems of Hahm Dong-seon, and ending with the brilliant sensuality of Choi Young-mi, whose work also asserts a determination to be both a woman and a free individual, this is a superb introduction to the largely undiscovered treasures of contemporary Korean poetry.

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Yu Jung-yul holds degrees in French Literature from Pusan National University, and is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College. A freelance photographer and translator, she is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Studio Art at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998) and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Award, and a Whiting Writer's Award. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Florida State University and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Also available: by James Kimbrell
The Gatehouse Heaven,
Winner of the 1997 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, Selected by Charles Wright
TC $20.95, 1-889330-13-2 CUSA
TP $12.95, 1-889330-14-0 CUSA

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Kim Hae-Gyeong (hangul: 김해경, hanja: 金海卿, September 23, 1910 – April 17, 1937), also known as his pen name Yi Sang (hangul: 이상, hanja: 李箱) was a writer and poet who lived in Korea under Japanese rule.[1] He is well-known for his poems and novels, such as Crow's-Eye View (hangul: 오감도, hanja: 烏瞰圖) and Wings (hangul: 날개). He is considered as one of the most important and revolutionary writers of modern Korean literature.

Reviews

[d · Rating 3 out of 5]

Landscape - (Hahm Dong-seon)

After the rain
Fell hard on the autumn roofs,
From the most far-flung house to the nearest village
You can hear the ripe persimmons
Heavy with the sun's red setting
Muttering now amongst themselves
That they are on the verge of falling.
As soon as the sun went under
As if hiccupped by the horizon,
The wind pulled in behind a train arriving from the surburbs
And let the night swell across
The field that turns
An annual crop, more or less, for fifty homes.
Before long electric bulbs are hot with light
And the first night of frost goes warm
Like the spot on the floor above the heat
piped in from the kitchen fire,
A crescent moon pokes out its face
Like the curved back of a long-toothed comb.





In the Submerged Area of Imha Dam - (Choi Young-mi)

Without you, my mind will not fall under any landscape's spell,
but I see your face at the tip of a branch
in the drowned forest, in the skyward arms.

Meditations on an oblivion of summers,
everyone's truth in a stream of truth,
all the dust my life gave life to,
it's all knocking along the river now, falling apart as the sun goes,
pulled into time which no one can step away from,
no one can swallow.
That October, leaves fell before losing their green and floated around
like lame ships,
but I was all stillness on the river bluff.
Prisons that I built and wiped-out in one fell swoop of a life.
Antique sighs as yet unanswered.
I wish they would sink under their own weight.

That October, I sat on the river bluff and cast loose
what was left of a done-for youth. I let thirty-five years go.
Emptiness on both sides of my hand.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yi Sang: Yi was an experimental poet of the 1930s, largely drawing inspiration from surrealism and Dada. This was not entirely well received in Korea, which at that time still had a very conservative, traditional attitude towards poetry--and poetry was an important element of Korean culture, so Yi's more progressive approach ruffled feathers. However, his work has since become much more influential and widely read, particularly following his death shortly after being released from a Japanese prison for being a thought criminal.
https://youtu.be/pC15pqDRdfs

Hahm Dong-seon: Interestingly enough, I can't find any references online to Hamh Dong-seon, apart from references to this book. I don't quite know what to make of that, but my most likely suspicion is that the translators have spelled his name in a slightly unusual way.
The editors compare Hamh's poetry to that of Robert Frost, which I think is a good comparison. Hahm's work is run through with nature imagery, depictions of working life, and nostalgia for a lost home. Whereas Frost's nostalgia seems more focused on a lost sense of the past, Hahm's is definitely tied to geographic location, because the village in which he was born was incorporated into North Korea when the Korean War "ended" in 1953. So, Hahm was not able to return to his birthplace, though according to the editors there is a hill in South Korea that he would often stand on to look over the border to the town where he was born. This sense of loss and dispossession is central to Hahm's work.
https://youtu.be/qmDlTM_bfS8

Choi Young-mi: The most contemporary of the three poets in this collection, Choi's work reflects some of the conflicts central to 1980s and after Korean culture. The struggle to shift from a military government to a democracy, for instance, shows up in several of her poems--reflective of her role in the protests of the 1980s. But her work also challenges conventional morality and notions of modesty/propriety, as her work often discusses sexual affairs openly. This caused a stir in Korea because the country remained, especially in the 1980s and 90s, relatively traditional and dominated by Confucianism, so a woman especially talking overtly about sexuality upset people.
https://youtu.be/4GjnhotoLEQ

[Laura J. Axelrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives readers a taste of three Korean poets, each from a different generation. Enthusiasts will appreciate the diversity of style, gender, age and content. My favorites include Yi Sang's Poem No. II and Poem No. XV. Hahm Dong-seon's work was also fascinating, especially when considering his life. "Records of a Journey" and "The Last Face" moved me deeply. A great book if you want to understand how war, exile and the fight for democracy play out in literature. It will undoubtedly lead me to study more work by these Korean poets.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because I was hooked on Yi Sang after reading "Morning" in Guernica. I was very excited that all of Crow's-Eye View was in this book (and learning that the title is a pun in the Hangul). It didn't disappoint.

Hahm Dong-Seon and Choi Young-mi on the other hand were fine. They seem far more conventional - which isn't an insult, and might also be a consequence of translation. That said I think James Kimbrell, the translator alongside Yu Jung-yul, does a decent job in the introduction. He does a "how do you do, fellow kids" thing by starting off talking about DJ's giving shout-outs to the then 80 years dead Yi Sang. If a true story, pretty cool. Regardless, weird.

He also describes the work of the other two poets more exactly (probably assuming you picked the book up for Yi Sang or have a vague sense of early 20th century poetry) but never fully contextualizes them. You can only do so much with the space you have, but clearly for Kimbrell he wants the poems to advocate on their own behalf without history. Which, fine, not my favored approach but I respect it.

Maybe the biggest gripe with this is that it allows them to awkwardly crosshatch three poets in the name of "bring[ing]...a bit of [Korean poetry's] energy, vitality, and relevance home to American readers." More relevant to American readers today - in Kimbrell's defense this published in 2003 - is that Choi Young-Mi fired up #MeToo in South Korea by calling out SK poetry icon Ko'un for sexual harrassment.

[Ann Keller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection compares and contrasts the poetry of three Korean poets, Yi Sang, Hahm Dong-seon and Choi Young-mi. Yi Sang was trained as an architect and his verses are somewhat short, providing the framework for his greater message. He died young, but his work stretches from humorous anecdotes to scientific word equations. One can only wonder what such an individual might have accomplished had he lived longer.

By contrast, Hahm Dong-seon was exiled from his home in what became North Korea and went on to chair the Korean Modern Poets Association. His poems find beauty in the sublime and much to cherish in life’s simplicity. His sweet words hold universal appeal.

Poet Choi Young-mi writes with unusual frankness, but the visions her words engender are strangely familiar. Her poems are as sharp as a rapier and as soft as a peacock’s delicate feather. Who better to conclude this collection than a mistress of such marvelous contrasts?

This poetry collection contains not only contrasting verse, but also the balance so prevalent in Oriental culture. The messages behind these poems will linger far beyond the turning of the final page.

[Bob Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

the Yi Sang poems were a little strange, as expected. Butterfly was easily my favorite of the numbered poems. But his best poems were the first two in the collection, about the Toy Bride.

Hahm Dong-seon was a solid poet, every one of his poems ended with a real gut-punch of a line. Here he is looking at his reflection in a window: "my mother's face rises up in mine/and from her face the quick rain streams down." At the end of his autumn poem we get these fine lines: "in my heart/a parched leaf is always sculling past." Great stuff.

The last poet, Choi Young-mi, was the best of the three. She's also the most contemporary and maybe that has something to do with it? Her poems seem more...calculated, like they were labored over longer, like they were constructed. I look forward to reading more of her poetry.

[Ryan Bollenbach]

My favorite of the three poets was definitely Yi Sang despite the fact that some of his poems I didn't quite "get" (I don't necessarily consider this a bad thing). I really loved the prose poems (esp. poem XV from a "A Crow's-Eye View" in his collection. There were poems I quite enjoyed from all three poets. Hahm Dong-seon reminded me, in parts, of Li-young Lee's more reverent and self-mythologizing poems. I especially liked "Record of a Journey" and "Colony." From Choi Young-mi, I enjoyed the "Amen" poems as slight variants on the personal and political poems that make up most of her work. The translation kept a distinct voice for each poet that keeps the collection feeling dynamic.