Poetry. Translation. Asian & Asian American Studies. This is a bilingual (Korean-English) collection of poetry by Shin Sok-jong (1907-1974), translated into English by Sung-Il Lee.
Critics have pointed out that Shin Sok-jong's poetic spirit is attuned to Utopian idealism, Taoist transcendentalism, and longing for pastoral leisureliness. And it is quite true that he was a poet who played a major role in building up the tradition of lyricism in modern Korean poetry. But the lyricism in his poetry, one must remember, is not an inborn trait of his poetic writings, but a way of attaining poise and calm and eventually, consolation in coping with and coming to terms with the harsh realities. Quite often he sounds like a dreamer; but the dream he indulges in is often the world of fantasy and surrealism he conjures up for self-hypnotism.--Sung-Il Lee, From the Introduction
Shin Sok-jong is the kind of poet who manages to weave together into a seamless unity nature, desire, and dreaming. His landscapes are filled with concrete images as well as inscrutable mist and fog. He constantly identifies himself and even metaphorically transforms himself into the commonplace, outdoor objects that he scrutinizes, such as mountains, flowers, fossils, trees, or bamboo. His love poems shiver with a deepening intensity of tenderness rather than passion: 'Within my heart / There's a river that flows, meandering, / With my first love thrown in it like a pebble' or 'In your eyes / Loom the dear faces / That I shall see again on a far-off day.' And yet, an underlying note of melancholy resonates in his writing in lines like 'You and I are white peach blossoms deprived of spring...' or 'My heart is dark as night...' His dreams, however, permeate these poems like fireflies that dazzle a summer night. He is constantly ready to head out into the unknown, restless to escape, to transcend mundane reality, yet his limitations frustrate his departure: 'I can neither fly like a white crane, / Nor waver like a flower in the wind.' Nevertheless, his poetry leaves the senses tingling with heightened expectation.--Bill Wolak
Every poem in this collection is seemingly a stroll through a pastoral garden with birds chirping and lilies blooming. However, this tranquility, surreal and dreamlike, exists in a place even the poet never knew, a never-land so far away, like his motherland he could only dream about, because in reality he only witnessed her endless sufferings and tortures under the feet of the invaders. Shin Sok-jong, a poet born and lived through the annexation of Korea by Japan for 35 years and the Korean civil war for three years and their aftermaths. His poems are filled with the Korean Han, the pain from the overwhelming helplessness in such a turbulence. He could only depict this loveland in his poems, retreat to his dreamland for a little peace, where he could, like a little boy's drawing, choose only what he loved, trees, flowers, birds, sun, wind, etc. All his pastoral themes and its lyrical song style are actually the disguise of the heavy sentiment of Han. Fortunately Sung-il Lee understands the poet's pessimistic idealism in depth. While singing together with the poet about the beauty of nature, he precisely captures and masterfully expresses into English the poet's Han, the pain of Korean people, the suffering of the Korean nation, and the hope for the future.--Hong Ai Bai
