Introduction

Born in 1908, Kim Kirim grew up to be a leading figure in the modernist movement in Korean literature in the 1930s. He earned his living as a newspaper journalist, writing reports during the day and composing poetry at night. A founding member of kuinhoe, an eclectic gathering of modernist writers and poets, he went on to befriend Yi Sang as his intellectual ally in this group.

A literary rebel, Kim Kirim was not shy about criticizing many Korean poets of the earlier generation, whom he saw as being cripplingly sentimental and overly flowery in their use of language. Instead, he espoused a poetics of intellectualism and positivity, the disciplined use of adjectives, and the revitalization of our world as the poet’s chief duty. His poetry was also influenced by T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards. In Eliot, he saw a poet whose influences had had to overcome, and in Richards, a critic he needed to emulate.

In Kim Kirim’s long poem Weather Map¹ (1937) a typhoon ploughs through an unprepared city. A new sun is born in the aftermath. Topical and apocalyptic, Kirim’s work consists of seven individual parts, each of which were initially published as a standalone poem. They were later gathered to form a single piece and published in book form in 1936. The volume was edited by Yi Sang, who also designed its striking cover. Brought together as one long poem, the seven pieces create a collage-like canvas of a modern East Asian metropolis in the path of a great storm.

The first two parts, “The Morning of the World” and “Citizen’s Parade,” show us a superficially peaceful world boiling with trouble beneath its surface. The second pair, “Typhoon’s Coughing Hour” and “Trace,” presents the storm’s approach and the destruction it brings as a metaphor for the philosophical, political, and economic transformations of the time that often proved disastrous for East Asian nations. The fifth and the penultimate parts, “Sick Landscape” and “Owl’s Incantation,” detail the dreary aftermath of the storm and stress and contain the poem’s most lyrical passages. The final part, titled “The Song of the Iron Wheel,” is a prophecy of a new age that will emerge from such ruin.

Weather Map is the kind of literary experience that we hardly ever have today. Grand and daring, the poem is the product of a maker who believed without irony that poetry can make things happen on a scale involving all of humanity. With such fervent faith, Kirim’s verse functions as both diagnosis of a dying society and herald of a new world.

For English readers, the experience of Kim Kirim’s Weather Map will inevitably bring to mind that other long poem brimming with modernist sensibilities. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Kim Kirim’s work expresses in fragmented imagery a ruined city and an alienated poetic voice, searching for the redemption of a cursed civilization. But Weather Map is not a mere Korean imitation of its English predecessor. In fact, Kim Kirim criticizes The Waste Land in an essay published within a year after the publication of his Weather Map. After discussing the poetic methods of his contemporaries, Kim Kirim concludes with the following observation:

We have clearly seen the earlier missteps of the poet of The Waste Land, who attempted to write a mythology of the 20th Century. But all he managed was to write a mythology of spiritual slash-and-burn farmers. On top of that burnt land of the messiah, he recklessly tried to rebuild the mythology of the Middle Ages.²

Kirim’s criticism of Eliot’s work informs us of what he was attempting to do with his own poetry: create a new mythology unburdened by the limited traditions of the past. In this regard, it is clear that Kirim meant his Weather Map to be a foundational work upon which to build such a vision.

However, despite continuing to produce a substantial amount of work, including three other volumes of poetry and several collections of literary criticism, Kim Kirim was unable to...