Maninbo: Peace & War by Ko Un

Abstract

or “t” to another, like spinning subatomic particles excited by an accelerator. This passage also suggests the epic dimensions of Streaming. The breadth, the depth, the historical and cultural reach, and the preternatural musings of the collection as a whole demand it be read as an epic poem, both in the sense of heightened language and in terms of its ambition. Two long poems, “Burn” and “Streaming ,” both of which are “mini-epics,” are placed in structurally equivalent positions in the collection. “Streaming” is the second poem in the collection, following the “Prelude ,” an elegy for the poet’s mother (the invocation of her mother as muse?). “Burn” is the penultimate poem, followed by a “Coda” entitled “Harp Strings.” “Streaming ” also makes use of refrains, which, when thinking of the collection as an epic, have the feel of strophe and antistrophe, especially when at the end of the poem they are combined into an epode. Despite its epic structure, Streaming is a lucid, intimate collection, one in which the heroes and the villains are people we know, where a butterfly and a wildfire take the place of the gods. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish Oklahoma City University Ko Un. Maninbo: Peace & War. Brother Anthony of Taizé & Lee Sang-Wha, tr. Hexham, Northumberland. Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions. 2015. isbn 9781780372426 Imagine: a young man is forced into compulsory labor while the civil war that rages around him kills millions of his compatriots ; when the conflict concludes, he spends the next decade a Buddhist monk, turning his back on the world; returning but filled with despair, he lurches toward alcoholism then suicide; he fails (several attempts) but is energized by a surging democratization movement and becomes a leading dissident ; over two decades he is imprisoned four times for parapolitical activities; he is accused of treason and sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he is tortured and beaten; he is pardoned, eventually, and becomes a father at fifty; all the while, prodigious numbers of his books are published —over 150 at last count—including the sprawling, thirty-volume Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives, 2005), which is, the poet tells us, “a collection of songs about the people I have come to know in this world.” The Bloodaxe edition brings new translations from volumes 11–20 into English, and these focus “on the sufferings of the Korean people during the Korean War”; to Ko Un, this was a conflict that stole: “the clarity in the eyes / Of people in autumn’s cool wind. / Gradually, / Not only the eyes of people / But of cows and horses in the stony fields.” The poet describes his oeuvre as “popular historical poetry,” and the more than two hundred poems in this book are each marked by moments of trauma; populated by students, doctors, jailers, drunks, dignitaries , dictators, rapists, rightists, leftists, police spies, dogs, refugees, daughters, et al., this book enumerates the human costs of ideological displacement endured by Koreans across the twentieth century. The poems are, essentially, elegies: “Since Liberation , Korea has been a land of blood. / Every single nook and cranny of our whole peninsula / Has become a cursed place . . .” And so this volume serves as a testimony, a monumental feat of remembrance memorializing the lives of ordinary people interrupted by extraordinary events. Musing on an earlier English-language translation of Maninbo (volumes 1–10, published by Green Integer in 2005), Robert Hass recalls a comment from Czesław Miłosz: “Woe to the poet born to an interesting piece of geography in a violent time.” Striding across the Korean peninsula, Ko Un is a literary giant once described by Care Santos Dissection Lawrence Schimel, tr. A Midsummer Night’s Press This collection of poems about relationships written by Spanish writer Care Santos is filled with intense language that perfectly captures the joy, hearbreak, and pain which come from being a woman in love. Crisp lines, a clever theme, and a beautiful sense of emotion tie each separate yet connected poem together. Sergio Ramírez Divine Punishment Nick Caistor & Hebe Powell, tr. McPherson & Company Set in Nicaragua, this genre-defying novel is considered one of the greatest literary works to come from Central America. Focusing on a famous 1933 trial, the book...