“A Factor of Magnificence is a Pleasure Eternally,” the primary Korean-English bilingual version of poet Kim Yeong-nang’s full oeuvre, translated by Brother Anthony / Courtesy of Hajun Books
There’s a saying in Korea: “Within the North, we have now Kim So-wol; within the South, we have now Kim Yeong-nang.” The 2 stand as twin pillars of the nation’s lyric poetry, their work nonetheless shaping the emotional panorama of contemporary Korean verse.
Kim Yeong-nang (1903-50) left behind simply 86 poems, written over the course of his 47-year life earlier than it was lower brief on the daybreak of the 1950-53 Korean Struggle. Final month, these writings discovered new life within the first Korean-English bilingual version of his full works.
“A Factor of Magnificence is a Pleasure Eternally,” translated by the veteran scholar Brother Anthony, locations the unique Korean poems alongside their English renderings. Learn facet by facet, they invite the reader to expertise Kim’s signature musicality because it strikes from one language to a different.
To hint how Brother Anthony first got here to translate the poems, one should return almost twenty years.
“Kim Hyeon-cheol, the poet’s son, arrived in my workplace 20 years in the past,” he instructed The Korea Occasions. “He had come again to Korea (after a protracted exile in america) hoping to seek out any individual who would translate the poems of his father.”
It was no easy activity. A lot of Kim’s work, written in Korean underneath Japanese colonial rule, is steeped within the native vocabulary and dialect of his hometown, Gangjin, South Jeolla Province. Complicating issues additional, a number of editions of the poems had appeared through the years, typically with refined variations within the textual content.
His translations have been finally printed in 2010 by a small, fledgling press within the U.S. However with little publicity and nearly no distribution, the e-book handed quietly from the general public’s discover. Earlier than lengthy, it went out of print.
Years later, a turning level arrived when Brother Anthony met Choi Sung-hoon, head of Hajun Books. Choi assembled an editor who meticulously in contrast the varied Korean editions to determine an authoritative textual content, then returned to Brother Anthony’s early translations and combed by them line by line for errors.
“I’m very proud of the end result, as a result of I knew there have been errors — issues I hadn’t understood correctly on the time,” the translator mentioned. “So this, I’d say, is the primary actual version.”
Poet Kim Yeong-nang / Korea Occasions file
Past the lyrical fantastic thing about Kim’s poems, Brother Anthony mirrored on the person himself. “I admired Kim Yeong-nang additionally for his life historical past.”
All through the years of Japanese colonial rule, the poet lived in quiet defiance. He wore his hair lengthy, continued to decorate in conventional hanbok and refused to undertake a Japanese title for himself or his kids.
Music was central to his life. He would invite the younger pansori (Korean narrative music) grasp Kim So-hee to his dwelling to sing, accompanying her on the drum. On the similar time, he was deeply drawn to Western classical music; his home was full of data, and when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra carried out in Tokyo, he bought a plot of farmland to pay for the journey to Japan.
After Korea’s liberation, nonetheless, his household background as a landowner led some on the left to label him an “enemy of the individuals” amid the nation’s ideological turmoil. Compelled to go away his hometown of Gangjin, he relocated to Seoul. There, throughout the Korean Struggle, he was killed by a stray shell as Seoul got here underneath bombardment.
“Beforehand, I solely actually knew Kim’s best-known poem, ‘Till Peonies Bloom,’” mentioned Choi, the writer. “However studying his work extra intently, I used to be struck by how musical they’re. He selected to write down nearly fully in pure Hangeul. I noticed how fantastically he captured the rhythm and texture of the Korean language, and that’s once I determined this assortment needed to be printed.”
The e-book is presently accessible solely in Korea, however Choi is in discussions to donate copies to main establishments, libraries and Korean research facilities abroad with the purpose of bringing Korean poetry nearer to a wider worldwide readership.
The writer mentioned he sees this e-book as a doable place to begin for a sequence, noting that Brother Anthony has already introduced plenty of different Korean poets into English.
