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Category Archives: Ko Un

Leading Korean poet comes to London

19-Apr-08

Leading Korean poet comes to London

Ko Un (고은), one of Korea’s most prominent living poets, will be giving his first ever UK poetry reading at the Korean Cultural Centre, London on Tuesday, 29 April at 7.00-8.30pm. “It is very striking to see the kind of tuning fork [Ko Un] has been, re-inventing himself in every decade through the turns in Korea’s postwar political and social history. In his early work, it’s my impression that he was writing in some version of the received tradition of Korean nature lyric with symbolist overtones, touched by the Korean folk tradition, touched by Son Buddhism, which, compared to the sense of refinement in Zen Buddhist poetry, seems earthy and intellectually tough. …Ko Un is a remarkable poet and one of ...
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Che Guevara in Korean poetry (part 2)

03-Dec-06
Thanks to daeguowl for researching this interesting question, and for coming up with some additional poems to consider. And a special thanks to Brother Anthony of Taize for giving of his time, and providing translations for the two key poems which our visitor was interested in. Here they are: Memoirs by Ko Un Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Lee Sang-Wha I was twenty. For no reason I wearily loathed the apricot-flowered spring days. I was starving. I wanted to fall Clang! on the bitterly cold snowfields of Irkutzk in Siberia -- forty below. I wanted to fall, shot, killed like a young Decembrist. An obtuse age, all I hoped was a breathless Sturm und Drang. I felt as if a wizard's hand had been cut off with a straw-cutter. When a hoe was thrust ...
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