Poetry and Politics

REVIEW ARTICLE Poetry and Politics The Silence ofLove: Twentieth-Century Korean Poetry. Edited and with an Introduction by Peter H. Lee. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii, 1980. xix, 348 pp. Index. $17.95. Paper $8.95. I When reading twentieth-century Korean poetry in English translation , one is struck by two distinct qualities. First, there is the unmistakable modernity, an immediacy of artistic expression, that Korean poetry shares with many distinguished poetic traditions in contemporary literature . Second, this poetry has especially poignant and fierce political overtones that provide a well-defined context for our appreciation of it. The Silence ofLove is an anthology of twentieth-century Korean poetry containing selected poems by sixteen eminent poets from Han Yongun to Kim Chi-ha. The translations are by Peter H. Lee and four other scholars in the field, U-ch'ang Kim, David R. McCann, Edward W. Rockstein, and Sammy E. Solberg.1 Lee, the editor of the book, believes that these sixteen poets are "likely to occupy a permanent place in the Korean poetic tradition." We are inclined to agree, now that we have read these poems and shared, to some degree, the tender and sharp images and the tears and blood that their authors have experienced over a period of some sixty years. It is, therefore, commendable that the editor has chosen to represent each poet with a substantial selection of poems arranged chronologically, thereby allowing the reader to form some impression of the poet's development, his overriding concerns, and the world he inhabits. Other English-language anthologies of "exotic" po- 128WANG etry, be it Korean, Chinese, or Serbo-Croatian, even today tend to present poems in a survey format, thus allowing the reader only a meager glimpse of each poet's work. By contrast, the arrangement of The Silence ofLove shows an admirable professionalism, a conscientious respect for the poets and their tradition. Translating Korean or Chinese poetry into English resembles the practice of playing with Latin verses in English which, for the early practitioner , was a means to demonstrate a kind of gentlemanly accomplishment that Douglas Bush has called "a specimen of polite learning, and of skill in English versification."2 Fortunately, Lee and his colleagues have made Korean poetry itself their primary target, and they have used translation as a means to scrupulous interpretation and evaluation. Like China, Korea boasts a long and splendid poetic tradition. The development of modern Korean poetry, moreover, parallels that of modern Chinese poetry. The subdued but insistent demand for a new poetry at the end of the nineteenth century was suddenly met by the publication of some experimental verse inspired, if only in part, by European ideas and calling for social and literary revolution. In the history of modern Korean poetry, then, we see the shadows of Byron, Verlaine, Gourmont, Baudelaire, Yeats, and Tagore extending into the vast domains of Confucianism and Buddhism. Furthermore, the aesthetic and philosophical thrust of Korean poetry has repeatedly been revitalized by one political issue after another. The independence movement of 1919, the liberation of 1945, the Korean War of 1950-1953, and afterward the ceaseless conflicts generated by a "hypocritical society upheld in the name of democracy and modernization" all have contributed to the precipitous development of modern Korean poetry. Such a phenomenal interaction of literature and politics has been experienced as painfully by no other nation in modern times. Patriotic fervor reveals a sense of frustration that makes Korean poetry especially meaningful; at the same time, there is always hope. "The poet's quest continues, a quest for the meaning of life," Peter H. Lee writes in his introduction to The Silence ofLove. "It may be a long and dark search, but the voice of conscience has a civilizing power in a barbaric world which would frustrate the cry of the self" (xix). II The chronological arrangement of modern Korean poets in the book allows the reader to make many interesting observations about a vigorous poetry. To a Chinese reader in particular, the most striking feature here is doubtlessly the gradual falling away of Chinese elements over time, leaving Korean poetry in the mainstream of modernism shared by POETRY AND POLITICS129 contemporary...